Legendary hip-hop producer, Dr. Dre, has pulled some material from his extensive vault of unreleased tracks, premiering a new song called Naked as well as several previously unheard freestyles and remixes on this week’s installment of his Beats 1 radio show, The Pharmacy.
The new track, which features vocalists Marsha Ambrosius and Sly Piper, is a classic high-energy siren song, complete with quick-rapped bars, synth strings, and a slow boom-bap undercarriage. (You can give it a listen below.)
In a vocal interlude during his weekly Internet radio show, Dre said that most of his music doesn’t see the light of day. “The majority of it is not for sale,” he said, “If you are a recording artist, or any type of artist, everything isn’t for sale.”
But with hundreds of unreleased tracks in his so-called “vault,” Dre has plenty of unreleased material to choose from when he decides to make something public.
In fact, Naked is likely a B side from his recently released album Compton: A Soundtrack, which featured Piper and Ambrosius on four of the album’s 16 tracks.
That said, a slow leak of B-sides and special one-off singles are all that fans will likely ever get from the 50-year-old songsmith in the future; According to the producer, Compton is his last studio album. And those of us who waited over 10 years for his many-times-rescheduled album Detox — a release that was eventually cancelled and replaced with Compton: A Soundtrack — are inclined to believe him. Plus, with last year’s sale of Beats By Dre headphones to Apple, in which the producer made over $600 million, Dre can definitely afford to never release a full album again.
Still, it’s highly unlikely that his creative side will be satisfied simply living the good life, and the producer will probably continue to work on new material, whether he decides to put it up for sale or not.
