Nas has officially broken the silence on his long-discussed collaboration with DJ Premier, revealing that their long-anticipated joint album is finally complete and includes tracks fans have been waiting on for years. In a conversation with Rolling Stone, the Queensbridge MC said the project pulls from unreleased sessions the duo recorded over time. “I’m going […]
Nas has officially broken the silence on his long-discussed collaboration with DJ Premier, revealing that their long-anticipated joint album is finally complete and includes tracks fans have been waiting on for years.
In a conversation with Rolling Stone, the Queensbridge MC said the project pulls from unreleased sessions the duo recorded over time.
“I’m going to say at least two of those ideas happened on this album,” Nas said. “We didn’t get a chance to do ’em when we were talking about ’em, but we finally got a chance to put those recordings together this year.”
While the album title remains under wraps, Nas made it clear this wasn’t just another studio link-up—it’s a reunion decades in the making.
“I can’t wait for people to finally hear it,” Nas said. “I don’t know about anybody else, but for me and him, it was personally a long time coming for us to do it.”
The album’s first single, “Define My Name,” already dropped earlier this year as part of Mass Appeal Records’ Legend Has It… series—a year-long celebration of New York’s Hip-Hop elite.
Nas & DJ Premier – Define My Name
The campaign kicked off in June with Slick Rick’s Victory, his first full-length project in over two decades, and has since included new music from Raekwon (The Emperor’s New Clothes) and Ghostface Killah (Supreme Clientele 2).
Next up in the series is Mobb Deep’s Infinite, due October 10, marking the group’s first album since Prodigy’s passing in 2017.
Big L’s posthumous Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King follows on October 31, with a new De La Soul project expected before the year closes.
“It’s 1995 all over again,” Nas told Rolling Stone. “Sometimes I feel like 2025 has that feeling. It’s not going backwards, [it’s] going forward, though.”
He added, “This series is to encourage [and] inspire Hip-Hop and remind us all [of] the pureness of Hip-Hop. I hope that we all can do this together.”
DJ Premier first teased the idea of a full-length collaboration with Nas back in 2013. Over a decade later, the album is finally real—and according to Nas, well worth the wait.