J. Cole Collab: The Dreamville duo taps the “Trench Kid” for new collaboration.
Dreamville’s Bas finally returns following his incredible guest spots on J. Cole’s The Offseason — recruiting the Dreamville boss, Lil Tjay and T-Minus for their wavy and melodic joint, “The Jackie.”
Cole controls the hook and lends a powerful verse, as Bas and Tjay both follow his lead with enjoyable rhymes and flowing chemistry. Bas also dropped the visuals for “The Jackie” Friday morning, as the trio look to make a strong case for “song of the summer.”
On July 1, Bas took to Twitter to announce that his highly-anticipated single with J. Cole and Lil Tjay will finally release this week.
The trio first began teasing the song on June 12, when Bas posted a preview of the track and the three were seen the next day on set for the accompanying music video.
Then on July 5, Lil Tjay posted another preview of the song to Instagram including a portion of the track where J. Cole’s verse leads into Tjay’s.
To put it simply, Dreamville’s J. Cole owned the month of May.
He released his sixth studio album The Off-Season on May 14, where he stepped out of his “no features” comfort zone to include some of rap’s hottest stars — including Lil Baby, 21 Savage, Morray and Bas several times.
Production on the album came from big names such as T-Minus, Timbaland, Boi-1da, and even J. Cole. The Off-Season debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart and sold 282,000 copies. Nine songs from the project reached the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, with two of those featuring Bas.
J. Cole also spent time after his album’s release playing professional basketball overseas in Rwanda for Patriots BBC of the Basketball Africa League (BAL). He played three games for the squad, averaging 1.7 points per game, 1 assist per game and 1.7 rebounds per game.
As for fellow Dreamville rapper Bas, he has not released a project since 2019, where he dropped his Spilled Milk 1 EP featuring other Dreamville artists JID, Ari Lennox and EARTHGANG. His last full-length project Milky Way came in 2018, and saw Bas dip more into his singing bag on songs “Tribe (feat. J. Cole)” and “Sanufa.”
Lil Tjay, famed for harmonious, auto-tuned singing and moody songwriting, is coming off the release of his second studio album Destined 2 Win in April. With songs like melancholic, TikTok popular “Calling My Phone” with 6lack and hostile banger “Headshot” with Polo G and Fivio Foreign, the album had three songs featured on the Hot 100 chart.
Each of these three artists have shown their dynamic ability to deliver above average singing performances, while also still being known to lyrically impress on any track.
Bas previewed a track from the three of them on his Instagram story on June 12, where the snippet has Tjay elegantly singing what appears to be his “bitch stop playing with me” hook followed by a sung verse from Cole.
On June 13, the trio recorded the music video for their new collaborative song, as Lil Tjay posted to Instagram some photos of him on set, along with a picture of all three of them together.
