Chance The Rapper – “The Return”

Chance The Rapper – “The Return”

Last week, Chance The Rapper was the subject of one of the more embarrassing rap news stories in recent memory. Chance’s former manager Pat Corcoran is suing Chance for breach of contract. Along the way, Corcoran is also bashing the hell out of The Big Day, the underwhelming album that Chance released last year — claiming that the album hurt Chance’s career because he simply didn’t work hard enough on it. Something like that might make someone want to stay quiet and reformulate for a while. Instead, Chance has some new music out today.

In 2016 and 2017, Chance and the Chicago R&B star Jeremih got together to release the Christmas-themed mixtapes Merry Christmas Lil Mama and Merry Christmas Lil Mama ReWrapped. Jeremih recently recovered from a life-threatening bout of COVID-19 that had him laid up in the ICU, so the idea of getting anything new from Jeremih feels triumphant. On Friday, Chance and Jeremih will release the collection Merry Christmas Lil Mama: The Gift That Keeps On Giving, which will mark the first time the songs from those two mixtapes have been officially available on streaming services. That new edition will also include two new tracks. Today, Chance has shared one of them.

Chance’s new song “The Return” doesn’t include Jeremih. Instead, it’s Chance rapping over a warm, melodic beat from producers Darius Scott, Beat Butcha, and Smoko Ono. On the track, Chance does a Christmasy version of the flow from “Broken Language,” the eternally hard 1994 underground rap classic from Brooklyn’s Smoothe Da Hustler and Trigger Tha Gambler. Check out “The Return” below.

Merry Christmas Lil Mama: The Gift That Keeps On Giving is out 12/11.

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