Wale Announces New Album ‘Everything Is a Lot’: ‘I Want to Express a Certain Level of Vulnerability’

In 2025, a batch is going connected successful the satellite astatine immoderate fixed infinitesimal — and Wale has prepped an apt soundtrack for that phenomenon. On Nov. 14, the Grammy-nominated D.C. rapper volition merchandise his eighth workplace album, Everything Is a Lot, via Def Jam.

The Billboard chart-topping MC’s caller medium promises to tackle the myriad stresses, beingness developments, and planetary pressures he’s encountered successful the 4 years since his past workplace LP, 2021’s Folarin II. That album, a sequel to his career-shifting 2012 mixtape of the aforesaid name, housed the J. Cole-assisted “Poke It Out,” Wale’s astir caller Billboard Hot 100 introduction (No. 73).

“One of the underlying things is however dense everything is successful the satellite astir me, my idiosyncratic life, and the industry,” helium exclusively told Billboard. “I carried each of that with maine and got it retired of my strategy done this project.” 

With an expansive soundscape courtesy of producers specified arsenic BNYX, Salaam Remi, Kel-P Vibes, Go Grizz, Streetrunner, Emil and Genio, EIA volition see bluesy pb azygous “Blanco,” which Wale debuted unrecorded astatine Dreamville earlier this year, and “Where to Start,” which samples SWV’s classical 1992 deed “I’m So Into You.” The 16-track set, recorded chiefly successful London and Los Angeles, volition besides diagnostic genre-bending collaborations with a yet-to-be-revealed roster that includes buzzy names crossed R&B, hip-hop and Afrobeats.

Everything Is a Lot besides serves arsenic Wale’s archetypal full-length merchandise nether Def Jam, pursuing six albums and implicit a decennary with Rick Ross’ Maybach Music Group, an imprint of Warner Records. During that stint, Wale followed up his 2009 Attention Deficit debut workplace medium with 4 Billboard 200 apical 10 projects, including the No. 1 albums The Gifted (2013) and The Album About Nothing (2015). After a semi-public falling out with MMG, particularly with Meek Mill, Wale signed with Def Jam successful 2023, marking a caller section successful his two-decade career. “The manufacture is simply a wholly antithetic spot than it was 4 years ago,” helium reflects. “They had a purge, and a batch of radical mislaid their jobs.”

Across Everything Is a Lot, Wale’s superior extremity was “to explicit a definite level of vulnerability.” To bash so, helium leaned connected soulful samples and bluesy Western influences, the second of which radiance done connected “Blanco,” the archetypal opus helium completed for the forthcoming LP. “It’s ne'er arsenic contrived arsenic radical think,” helium says of the album’s varied accumulation and strikingly honorable tracks similar “Lonely.” “If I’m successful the temper to constitute something, I conscionable get to it. It’s each astir capt...