Culture January 17, 2020

Eminem drops brand-new surprise album, 'Music to Be Murdered By'

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You can stop wondering when Eminem's going to drop the follow-up to his 2018 album, "Kamikaze."

It's out now.

With no prior announcement, Eminem released "Music to Be Murdered By" just after midnight Friday. His 11th studio album clocks in at over an hour and includes 20 tracks, which feature collaborations with Juice Wrld, Anderson.Paak, Q-Tip, Black Thought, Ed Sheeran, Young M.A., Royce da 5'9" and more.

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The artist also dropped a video for the track "Darkness." The six-minute clip, featuring Royce da 5'9" and Resto, begins with Eminem ruminating on being alone, while the opening lyric to the 1965 Simon and Garfunkel classic "The Sound of Silence" plays behind him.

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"Here I am alone again/Can't get out of this hole I'm in/It's like the walls are closin' in/You can't help me, no one can," Eminem raps over sparse, moody instrumentation.

Pierre Andrieu/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
Rapper Eminem performs during a concert at the Stade de France in Saints-Denis, near Paris, Aug. 22, 2013.

The video immediately reveals itself to be a stark statement about gun violence, with Eminem putting himself in the place of the gunman who killed 58 people in 2017 at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas.

"I don't wanna be alone in the darkness anymore," Eminem sings over and over in the chorus.

The video ends with a wall of video monitors revealing news of mass shootings from around America, and the words, "When will it end? When enough people care." There's also a call to register to vote "and help change gun laws in America."