Daytona is released

Why it matters

Daytona came out May 25, 2018, on G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam. It is Pusha T's third solo album. Kanye West produced every track. The album is seven songs long, twenty-one minutes total. The compression is the point: there is no filler, no posse cut excursions, no padding to game streaming-equivalent units. The album won the 2019 Best Rap Album Grammy nomination (lost to Cardi's Invasion of Privacy) and is widely treated as one of the most compact and best-engineered late-2010s rap records. "If You Know You Know," "The Games We Play," "Hard Piano" with Rick Ross, "Santeria," "Infrared" (the closing track, a Drake diss that opened the Pusha-vs-Drake exchange). Kanye's production across Daytona is the densest, most-soul-sample-derived work he had done in years. Pusha's writing is the densest cocaine-narrative writing he had done in his career, which is saying a lot for the Clipse alumnus. The album cover, a Polaroid of Whitney Houston's drug-littered bathroom that Kanye reportedly paid the Houston estate $85,000 to license, is one of the most-discussed visual choices in 2010s rap. You should hear Daytona in one sitting. The twenty-one minutes earn the compression.