Nas and DJ Premier have revealed the tracklist for their long-awaited joint album Light-Years, and it’s guaranteed to stoke the excitement even more.
The hip-hop veterans took to social media on Monday (December 8) to give fans their first look at the eagerly anticipated project, which drops this Friday (December 12) via Mass Appeal Records.
Light-Years clocks in at 15 songs and includes sequels to some of Nas and Premo’s most iconic tracks, adding to their legacy as one of the greatest rapper-producer duos of all time.
“N.Y. State of Mind Pt. 3” serves as the third installment in their gritty, Rotten Apple-centric series which began on Illmatic and continued on I Am…, while “3rd Childhood” is the follow-up to “2nd Childhood,” a storytelling-driven standout from Stillmatic.
The guest list also nods to Nas’ decorated past, with longtime partner-in-rhyme AZ making the sole feature on the album (on “My Story Your Story”). The Brooklyn MC famously made his debut with a scene-stealing verse on “Life’s a Bitch” before joining Nas as a member of The Firm (alongside Foxy Brown, Nature and formerly Cormega) and enjoying a successful solo career of his own.
Interestingly, what was billed as the lead single, “Define My Name,” does not appear on the tracklist but is still worth keeping in your Esco and Premo playlist as you gear up for the album’s release later this week.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Nas suggested that Light-Years will include a few older songs that he and DJ Premier recorded when they first made plans for a joint album roughly two decades ago.
“I’m going to say at least two of those ideas happened on this album,” he revealed. “We didn’t get a chance to do ’em when we were talking about ’em, but we finally got a chance to put those recordings together this year.”
The Queensbridge kingpin also expressed his excitement for the project, saying: “I can’t wait for people to finally hear it. I don’t know about anybody else, but for me and him, it was personally a long time coming for us to do it.”
Light-Years will mark the seventh and final installment in Mass Appeal Records’ Legend Has It… series, a year-long victory lap of releases from some of New York hip-hop’s most iconic names.
Slick Rick kickstarted things in June with his comeback LP Victory, before passing the baton to Raekwon (The Emperor’s New Clothes), Ghostface Killah (Supreme Clientele 2), Mobb Deep (Infinite), the late Big L (Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King) and De La Soul (Cabin in the Sky).
“It’s 1995 all over again,” Nas, who co-owns Mass Appeal Records, told Rolling Stone of the series. “Sometimes I feel like 2025 has that feeling … [That] urgency, that vibration, the celebration of life and these songs and these albums, what they meant 30 years ago.”
He added: “It’s a celebration of a great impact, a standard that they set that we could never forget because it keeps us aiming higher. This series is to encourage [and] inspire hip-hop and remind us all [of] the pureness of hip-hop.”
This legends has it series has set a new high bar for modern hip hop. Nas is artist of the year from all his contributions to albums in the legends series. Nas is also executive of the year for pulling off the incredible legends has it series. Mass Appeal is record label of the year for dropping incredible albums in this series. Hopefully there will be another series at some point in the future. For now we need a legends has it posse cut!