Nas and DJ Premier Preview Long-Awaited Collaborative Album With ‘Define My Name’

Three decades ago, Nas and DJ Premier teamed up for a run of songs on the rapper’s acclaimed debut album Illimatic. In the time since, both have become hip-hop legends in their own right. But later this year, Nas and DJ Premier will go all-in on their first full-length collaborative album. The title and release date for the record have not yet been revealed, but its newly-released first single, “Define My Name,” offers a preview of what they have coming.

“At twenty, I said I’d better quit by thirty / Then by thirty, I thought by forty rapping is corny / How wrong was I? / Never would have thought at fifty, new songs by Nas would be hard and live,” Nas raps on the second verse. Illimatic was released when the rapper was 20 years old. He’ll turn 51 this year.

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“Define My Name” concludes with an outro from Nas and DJ Premier where they look back at where they’ve been and look ahead at where they’re going. “Ayy, yo, thirty years later, Illmatic was dropped / Yeah— man, what the fuck am I doing? Hahahaha,” Premier starts, with Nas adding, “Ayy, yo, Preem, chill / I got the rhymes, you got the beats / Thirty years later, we back in the streets, we back in the lab.”

Ahead of the single release, Nas shared a set of then-and-now photos of himself with DJ Premier on Instagram. It has been nearly two decades since the artists first started teasing a follow-up to their Illimatic collaborations “N.Y. State of Mind,” “Represent,” and “Memory Lane (Sittin’ In Da Park).”

In 2006, Nas told the now-defunct Scratch Magazine: “We talked about doing an album together, and some of the listeners want to rush the shit — I wanna rush it, too — but I just want to pull pieces from all kinds of different people for this next puzzle because a lot of people think shit got easy, that I quit.”

But on the “Define My Name” outro, Nas declares: “It’s time, it’s album time.”

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