Nas and DJ Premier have shared the 15-song tracklist for their upcoming collaborative album, Light-Years. The project will feature a single guest appearance from AZ on the song, "My Story Your Story." It also includes a third part to Nas' iconic song, "N.Y. State of Mind." He previously dropped a second part on his album, I Am..., in 1999.
Nas and DJ Premier have been hinting at working on a collaborative project for well over a decade at this point. Speaking with Rolling Stone, back in October, Nas confirmed that a couple of the ideas they had during previous attempts to get the project to come to fruition will appear on Light-Years. "I’m going to say at least two of those ideas happened on this album. 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," he said.
Nas & DJ Premier "Light-Years" Release Date
Light-Years will mark the conclusion of Nas' ongoing Legend Has It... series for Mass Appeal Records when it releases on December 12. For the series, Nas has been helping release new projects from Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Mobb Deep, De La Soul, Big L, and Slick Rick.
Elsewhere during the aforementioned interview with Rolling Stone, Nas discussed the critically acclaimed album series. "It’s 1995 all over again," Nas said. "Sometimes I feel like 2025 has that feeling. It’s not going backwards, [it’s] going forward though. It’s that feeling of urgency, that vibration, the celebration of life and these songs and these albums, what they meant 30 years ago, it’s still thriving right now. Even from younger people, they’re all derivatives of that early sound. And these artists here, from Slick Rick — he is the reason that all of us even have a pen in our hands. You look at him and you think of Mobb Deep, and you think of Raekwon and Ghostface, De La Soul, [it’s] some of the most different, brave, bold, intelligent hip hop music ever made."
He continued: "And of course, we lost some of our brothers along the way, [but] we’re still representing for them and they’re still representing themselves through the series. 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. I hope that we all can do this together."
