Kendrick Lamar reportedly already began working on his next project.
Sounwave, the TDE producer sat down with Complex for a new interview, where he reflect on his relationship with Kendrick Lamar, and working with him over the years. He has worked on every Kendrick Lamar album, including the most recent “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers“, and he reveals that they are already working on the next one.
“Oh, we always start, immediately after. Like, we’re starting on the next one now,” he said on the timeline of creating the Mr. Morale album. “That’s never going to change, all the way from the Kendrick Lamar EP. The next day, we started on Section.80. It’s just the ideas never stopped. That’s one of the main reasons I go on tour with him, is to create the next album. We can’t skip a beat. We have to just keep it going. There’s no breaks. There’s no such thing as a vacation when you’re doing what you love. Everything you do is what you love to do, so you’re excited. Your family might feel a different way about it, but it’s always like, what’s next? We’re like kids in a candy shop. Personally, once I release an album like this, I don’t go back to it for a while, because I lived it so much. It’s like, it’s not for me anymore. It’s time for me to clear my head, so the best thing to do is to think about the next project.”
He also shares details of creating the latest studio effort of K. Dot. “It was rough. It was good times, bad times, and frustrating times. I remember we went through so much from the five year gap. We lost very key figures in our culture in Nipsey [Hussle] and Kobe [Bryant] within less than a year of each other, which can bring anybody down. It brought me down, to the point where I was creatively stuck. Then mix COVID with that, lockdowns and all of that, it was just an emotional wreck for me personally, to the point where I was drained. I was forcing myself to create music, but eventually you gotta get out of it. I found myself A&R-ing a lot more than production. When things opened up a little bit, though, you could actually get in the studio with the artist. You could actually feel the energy—things that you forgot you needed. I’m a perfectionist. I need someone to be like, “No, no, no, that’s actually good. Don’t throw that beat away.” Otherwise, all my beats would never come out because I just feel like it could be better. I still listen to the songs today and I’m like, “Ah, I wish I didn’t do that.” That’s just the perfectionist in me. I’m hard on myself, so you need people like Kendrick to be in the studio to give you life sometimes.”
“It’s mainly just having no boundaries anymore. The fact that we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want it, that allows us to think bigger. We can get any type of instrumentation we want and make it our own. It just opens your eyes to a completely different world of things that kids coming up from Compton can never imagine,” he said about his creative process being evolved while working with Kendrick.
Sounwave remembers his first interaction with Kendrick: “He had this tie-dye hoodie on and he didn’t say a word.” Kendrick, however, popped into life when he performed one of his beats, rhyming for “20 minutes continuous, freestyling off the top of his head.” Sounwave was instantly taken surprise, but the two wouldn’t run into one other again for another year. They eventually got back together in the session with TDE’s Top Dawg and Punch. “We’ve been rocking ever since,” he says.
Check out his full interview here and the new album below.
