Everything We Know About Kanye West's "SWISH"

People-- even the ones who disliked Yeezus-- really want to hear Kanye West's new album. Obviously, that much can be inferred from the fact that he's simultaneously our generation's most respected and most controversial hip hop artist, but beyond that, fans are taking pretty desperate measures to hear new music from him. Most recently, a Whitehouse.gov petition was started will the foolhardy aim of getting Barak Obama to "make" Kanye release it, but prior to that, we saw Reddit users causing chaos by claiming they had recorded a listening session and struggle rappers trying to boost their followers by bragging about hearing it.

Throughout all this, Mr. West has remained just as secretive, if not more so than ever, about the hard details of the album, first announced as So Help Me God, then changed to SWISH. Although you can chalk some of that up to his personality, much of the obfuscation is due to the album's constantly-in-flux status, with announcements being made and subsequently forgotten, an absurd amount of purported guests coming out of the woodwork, and hoax after hoax getting exposed.

Frequent Kanye collaborator Mike Dean summed it up best earlier this week-- "Whenever Kanye says it's done, it's done"-- so we're not going to pester him to rush through it. Rather, in light of how elusive, sprawling and contradictory SWISH's rollout has been, we're here to contain everything we know in one concise article. 

Kanye's last two albums wildly altered the way we think about production these days, with a collaborative approach being favored over the more solo-driven efforts on his earlier albums. For MBDTF, that meant assembling a legendary camp of producers (RZA, Q-Tip, DJ Premier, Madlib, Pete Rock) for input; on Yeezus, he went more left-field but kept the more-the-merrier approach, with Daft Punk appearing in the credits alongside electronic experimentalists like Hudson Mohawke, Gesaffelstein, Brodinski, Evian Christ, Arca and Lunice.

This time around, we've caught wind of more collaborations with Q-Tip and Rick Rubin (the latter of whom lent his famous "reduction" techniques to Yeezus just days before it dropped). S1, another familiar face in Kanye's universe, said he was asked to send "feel-good" tracks to West. As far as West's more adventurous side goes, he tapped pop-leaning experimentalists Cashmere Cat and Sinjin Hawke for "Wolves," and Yeezus collaborator Evian Christ also said he contributed new material. 

If SWISH is good enough to squash a beef that once had Cons telling Pusha T(errance) to "go take a breather on the terrace before he does something to make his team perish" on wax, it has to be great. Earlier this year, the two dudes met up, hit the studio and snapped a few pics, leading Cons to declare, "All G.O.O.D. in 2015. Pusha and I deaded everything and we creatively vibed with Kanye for this new LP."

King Push was noticeably absent from Yeezus, and Cons hasn't been involved in a Kanye album since Late Registration, so their presences would be much welcomed on the new project. As West has previously enlisted both as writers, their contributions could end up being visible only in the liner notes, but hey, we're sure Consequence would still be very appreciative.

It seems like every month, a new artist snaps a pic in the studio with Kanye or else mentions that they've been working with him on SWISH. In addition to Pusha and Cons, here's the full list of rumored collaborators, along with all we know about their work with Ye:

Young Thug: said he had "a couple of songs" with Kanye in January 2014, but also said West told him he wanted to "do an album with me" two months ago.

Chief Keef: manager said that the pair had "several" new songs together in February 2014.

King Louie: posted a picture of him and West in the studio in January 2015.

Bruno Mars: West tweeted "I also would love for Bruno to sing this hook on this song 88 Keys / Puff and I produced…" in February 2015.

Skepta: a fan told a British publication that West "was in the studio with Skepta at the moment" in March 2015.

Madonna: said "we wrote another song together, which is going to be on his record" in March 2015.

Chance The Rapper: posted a picture in the studio with West in April, although they may have been working on Chance's next "collaborative effort." 

Justin Vernon: West said "we did some more joints together" in June 2015.

This was definitely in the early stages of the album's creation, but West claimed that his next album would be just eight songs long in December 2013:

“I think my next album is going to be eight songs. It’s just reducing down the amount of information that you need. People say a design is the point where you can’t take anything else away. [Yeezus] was very, very designed. I took a departure from radio and popular music in order to get this seat here. If I hadn’t made Yeezus, I wouldn’t be sitting here with this cool font at Basel right here.”

Last year, West got married in Florence, Italy, and although a translated report in an Italian newspaper seemed to suggest that he was working on an album called Made In Florence, it soon became clear that his album was just partially "made [recorded] in Florence." Whether this will have any influence on the sound is unclear, but West is always very particular about the location of his album recording, as evidenced by his absconding to Hawaii for 808s and MBDTF. 

Of the several industry folk who have claimed that they've heard SWISH, only a few have offered descriptions of the sound:

Evian Christ said West requested "something that sounds a bit like Otis Redding, a bit like Mobb Deep."

An anonymous source who said he/she had heard "six of the album's twelve tracks" in May 2014 said there was "nothing abrasive," and was "mostly a mixture of soul samples and tamed Yeezus-esque darkness."

Longtime West collaborator Malik Yusef was a bit more artful in his description of the sound in October 2014, saying:

"This album is different. It's like a pair of Timberlands; like how Timberlands are not quite leather and not quite suede. It's not the smooth, slick Chicago music sound we have right now and it's not the ruggedness of just 'hip-hop hip-hop hip-hop.' We're still working like a motherfucker. We've been all around the world [recording]."

West is obviously at the point in his career when label approval means next to nothing, but even still, we can't imagine many Def Jam reps were too overjoyed about Yeezus' avant-garde stylings. That might not be the case with SWISH, as the label's CEO, Steve Bartels, seemed pretty pleased by what he heard in October 2014:

"It sounds incredible. He's focused, energetic, happy and making unbelievably great music. Kanye always wants to make sure that when it actually arrives it's at the best possible place it could be, that the first song is as big as the last."

West's seventh solo album has already gone through one name chance, with Ye announcing So Help Me God in March, but then switching it up to SWISH just two months later. The most recent change-up came with a hint of more in the future, too: 

I’m changing my album name to SWISH

I might change it again but that’s the name now