American musician DJ Khaled's 2016 album Major Key featured a track titled "Nas Album Done" with Nas which announced the completion of his album. The same year, Kanye West expressed his wish to produce an album by Nas, seemingly promising Barack Obama that he would achieve this.[6][7]
In May 2017, Nas' brother, Jungle, made a post on Instagram in a recording studio with the hashtag #NasAlbumAlmostDone.[8]
Release and promotion
In April 2018, Kanye West announced that he was producing Nas' new album with a release date of June 15, 2018.[9] West later released an incomplete track listing of the five albums he was working on, revealing the Nas track "Everything".[10] On June 12, West revealed a full tentative tracklist for the album, while the album title and cover art was revealed on June 14, a day before release.[11]
Nasir was met with generally mixed reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 58, based on 16 reviews.[13]
For The A.V. Club, Colin McGowan praised Kanye West's "lavishly triumphant production" on songs such as "White Label" and Nas' political awareness on "Cops Shot the Kid" but observed filler in the "empty empowerment" of "Everything" and the "late-90s jiggy rap" of "Bonjour"; he concluded that Nasir was a less-than-definitive experiment for the rapper.[15] Elizabeth Aubrey of NME wrote: "Whilst stylistically Nasir may well have plenty of strong moments, its contradictions make it a difficult, problematic listen: it's the silences on here which so often deafen." She praised West's production and the album's brevity, as well as Nas' lyrical maturity and social awareness, however noted that the political beliefs shared sometimes "ring hollow", being at odds with views shared by West. She also believed the rapper's male gaze of women conflicted with the album's underlying theme of equality, while failing to address allegations of abuse by Nas' ex-wife Kelis: "It's a deeply troubling conflict on an album that manages to be so successfully woke on one level and yet so blatantly archaic on another".[20]
Alexis Petridis of The Guardian praised West's production and Nas' tackling of social justice issues but also criticised Nas for not addressing domestic violence allegations, as well as for the "mercurial" nature of his lyrics stating "[Nas'] rhymes shifting from acute, powerful indictments of racism to stuff that makes no sense, or seems to be there purely for the purposes of provocation" and describing some of the themes as "conspiracy theories".[17] In a review for Rolling Stone, Paul Thompson described the album as "a frustrating listen, with glimpses of greatness". He wrote that "Nasir is among the weakest Nas albums, but there's nothing spectacular about its failure", describing it as "unfocused and unclear", however noted that "there are interesting flashes elsewhere on the album", praising "Everything" and "Adam and Eve", as well as describing "Cops Shot the Kid" as "cogent".[22] Online hip hop publication HipHopDX described the album as "imperfect fine art", concluding that "When you factor in all its dexterity, randomness and overall generality, it's hard to truly believe Nasir was the album he had been cerebrally building these past six years."[24]Robert Christgau gave the album a one-star honorable mention () in his capsule-review column for Vice, singling out "Cops Shot the Kid" and "Everything" as highlights while crediting Nas for "bringing the knowledge, mixing in the sophistry, and dropping a laugh line he knows the boss [West] can't top: 'Everybody's saying my humility's infectious,' what a card".[25]
While reflecting on the album, Nas expressed confusion as to why the album didn't resonate with audiences and critics. "I don't know what went wrong," Nas began. “I like "Cop Shot the Kid,' I like 'Adam and Eve. I like the music in 'Simple Things.' It's a short album. We just didn't get enough time. I wish we'd worked on it more.“[26]
Commercial performance
Nasir debuted at number five on the US Billboard 200 with 77,000 album-equivalent units, of which 49,000 were pure album sales.[27] It serves as Nas's twelfth top-ten album in the United States.[28] The album dropped to the number 36 in its second week, earning an additional 14,000 album-equivalent units.[29]
