Pop Smoke’s highly-anticipated project FAITH is currently available on all digital streaming platforms. Featuring the likes of Kanye West, Pusha T, The Neptunes, 21 Savage, Rick Ross, Kid Cudi and others, each rapper takes their turn paying homage to the fallen superstar — who’s second posthumous release is heartbreakingly fitting for the King of New York.
While Pop Smoke‘s highly anticipated album FAITH is set to drop this weekend, it’s hard not to notice that this will be the second posthumous project from the late-Brooklyn rapper in under a year.
Regardless, fans are more than excited to hear new music from Pop Smoke and his close collaborators.
His debut posthumous album Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon released five months after his death, as the 50 Cent curated project fittingly honored the late-rapper’s budding legacy. Now, as FAITH is set to hit DSPs Friday, the details of the album have slowly been emerging from his camp over the course of the past few weeks. On June 15, frequent collaborator Rico Beats took to Instagram to announce the album was 95% complete.
Then, a week later on June 23, the official trailer for the album was released. In it, Pop Smoke speaks about his hunger to become a historic artist and bring the city of New York with him. At the end of the trailer it reveals that the album would release on July 16.
At the time, it was believed that the album would be self-titled, considering the pre-save page for the project on Apple Music showed title Pop Smoke. On the pre-save page, it also allows fans to listen to the “Outro” of the album, which is a half-minute long clip of Pop Smoke speaking on the importance of focus and ambition to achieve your goals in life.
On July 11, Pop Smoke’s manager Steven Victor tweeted that the album would be titled FAITH.
The next day, July 12, Victor used his personal Instagram to reveal the official cover art of the album and drop another teaser video.
On the morning of July 15, less than 24 hours before the album’s release, Victor took to Instagram one more time to announce the official tracklist, loaded with marquee names like Kanye West, Pusha T, 21 Savage, Rick Ross, Lil Tjay, Future, Kid Cudi, Quavo and several others.
In the buildup to the album’s release, Pop Smoke’s camp used some creativity to give fans a sneak peak of how it would sound. In Los Angeles and New York in the past few weeks, posters promoting the upcoming album began to appear, revealing snippets for songs on the record when a phone was held up to them.
Pop Smoke had mountains of music in the vault when he passed, evident in the release of a first full-length posthumous album, a fifteen additional song deluxe version, a handful of songs given for the soundtrack to the movie he starred in posthumously and several feature verses that appeared on his peers’ songs after his death. Even when more Pop Smoke music was released, the quality of his work never diminished, as he went No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon.
With all this being said, it would be right to expect classic Pop Smoke excellence, as the Woo’s newest posthumous album FAITH drops this Friday, July 16.
