Eminem Drops Brand-New Album; ‘Music To Be Murdered By’

You can stop wondering when Eminem‘s going to drop the follow-up to his 2018 multi-platinum album, Kamikaze. It’s out now.

With no warning, Eminem released Music to Be Murdered By just after midnight Friday. His 11th studio album, clocking in at over an hour with a generous 20 tracks, features collaborations with Juice Wrld, Anderson.Paak, Q-Tip, Black Thought, Ed Sheeran, Young M.A., Royce da 5’9″ and more.

Em 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.

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

Music to Be Murdered By is available now from all the usual outlets. The album’s also streaming on YouTube.