It’s shattering one moment and slippery the next, a place where a jarringly saccharine sample of the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 hit “I Want It That Way” coexists with a jittery, steamrolling track built around the music from Microsoft Windows’ videogame Space Cadet 3D Pinball. When I only had two weeks to finish up everything I had to cut it down to a couple seconds.”Īt 18 tracks and 62 minutes, Eternal Atake operates like the chaotic catharsis of a prolific rapper silenced by forces largely out of his control. There was some changes as far as some of the skits. “So I went ahead and started working on one. “I thought it would be cool if there was a whole storyline with it,” she continues. According to Lee, the loose concept of Uzi traversing the cosmos throughout the album began coalescing over a year ago, and inspired her to start adding skits and transitions to flesh out the idea. Kesha Lee, Uzi’s primary engineer, estimates that she’s been working with Uzi for the past five years, comparing the ease of the process now to playing a video game. If a fan leaks one or two songs, that’s pushing his album back another eight months.”
Uzi really takes a lot of time on his songs. Future and Thug are doing 10 songs a night. Uzi “has been working on Eternal Atake at least since 2018,” says the producer TM88, the force behind the rapper’s most commercially successful single, “XO Tour Llif3.” “Leaks slow everybody up. (Though not in the case of Lil Mosey’s “Blueberry Faygo.” ) Once a leaked track wriggles into the world, it’s often viewed as a lost cause from a commercial perspective and nixed from any potential album. Confusingly, even songs that Uzi seems to officially release have been dubbed leaks by his label. Demand is so high that files keep sneaking out of the studio and onto the internet many have actually appeared on Spotify under fake artist names like Lil Kambo. were from Eternal Atake - and determined to get it by any means necessary. Uzi’s fans are fervent about new music - on Saturday morning, 16 of the Top 20 most-streamed songs on Spotify in the U.S. Producers who work with Uzi say the biggest obstacle to the timely release of Eternal Atake was not contract struggles but leaks.