Chance the Rapper‘s long-awaited sophomore album, Star Line Gallery, finally has a release date… ballpark.
The Chicago rapper took to Instagram Live on Friday (December 22) to make the announcement, and also had a bit of fun at his followers’ expense.
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“My album’s coming out next spring!” he said, while noting that there were only “about 500 people” in the live online session.
“Nobody loves it when I’m doin’ good work, for real!” he snarked. Check out the clip below.
Chance the Rapper has been hyping up Star Line Gallery for quite some time, though fans hadn’t had any sort of timeline on its release until now.
Over the summer, the Acid Rap hitmaker hyped up his upcoming LP with full confidence, writing: “It’s merched I got the best next album outta all the n-ggas that have a next album [three weeping emojis].”
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“Merched” is Chicago slang for “proven,” so Chance seems fully confident in the statement. This is a particularly bold claim considering his full-length release was widely panned by fans and the media.
However, he has since dropped a string of successful singles, as well as a joint project with Jeremih, so an impactful comeback via the upcoming Star Line Gallery is indeed likely.
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In early June, the Chi-town native phoned in to Audacy Check In to provide an update on the follow-up to 2019’s The Big Day.
“It’s one of my proudest projects in terms of writing and artistic vision,” he said. “There’s an immense amount of work to be done with it. But it’s cool ’cause I feel like the love and intentionality that goes into making each physical art piece allows me to show people in these museum spaces what I’m working on as I go, the highs and the lows, kind of like a preview to the project…”
The album title shares its name with Chance and Vic Mensa’s festival in Ghana. The Black Star Line Festival took place in Accra’s Black Star Square, also known as Independence Square, in early January 2023.
During an interview on Sway in the Morning last year, he broke down the deeper meaning behind Star Line Gallery.
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“I was inspired by Marcus Garvey in the early 1900s, 1919 through actually 1922, so 100 years ago now,” he said. “He started and ran this very important, integral shipping line. He had a fleet of ships, these giant ocean liners which are the size of cruise ships, that he owned and funded with common Black folks’ money.”
He continued: “But what he did with it was he created a trade route between the United States, all of the Black islands and the continent of Africa, and that created a network of people where people from all over the world were interconnected and working with each other and taking trips together and created this connectivity that didn’t exist before.”
