This morning on NPR's All Things Considered, Danny Brown shared a new song "Rolling Stone" from his upcoming album Atrocity Exhibition. Stream it below at 26:07. It follows "When It Rain" and "Pnuemonia," and strikes out a somber and reflective stance in a minimalist groove, featuring and produced by Petite Noir. "He didn't know what I was going for with the album," Brown said, "but he hit the nail on the head."
Brown also sat down for a wide-ranging interview. At the start, he names Nas's "The World Is Yours" as his favorite rap song. "That's the first time I ever heard rap like that. It's so unpredictable. Like if you heard the intro and the way the beat came on, you didn't expect him to get on it like that... This was back in the '90s when it was cool to be smart. No one wants to be the smart guy now."
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He arrived at the title Atrocity Exhibition over anxiety of his public persona, something he believes he and Ian Curtis of Joy Division share a kinship over. "When you listen to the Joy Division song ["Atrocity Exhibition"] he's talking about how he feels like a freakshow animal or something. He used to go perform and his epilepsy would make him have seizures. A lot of people used to get entertained by that [and] people look at me like I'm some type of crazy drug addict or something, and it might be true, it might not. But don't get entertained by that. But I feel like people are right now, to the point where if I came out like 'I'm completely sober,' people might not want to listen to my music anymore, or might think it lost something because the drugs triggered it."
Atrocity Exhibition drops September 30, and will feature Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt, Kelela and Cypress Hill's B-Real. Brown has called the record his "career album." Read Danny's FADER cover story here.
