Eminem Drops Surprise Album, ‘Music To Be Murdered By’, And Fans Are Going Wild

Watch the music video for “Darkness” from the veteran rapper’s new album, which takes aim at gun violence.

Brandon Friederich

Jan 17, 2020

Eminem rocked social media Thursday night with the surprise release of his 11th album, Music to be Murdered By. The follow-up to Kamikaze, which also dropped without warning in 2018, features 20 songs and guest appearances by Ed Sheeran, Black Thought, Q-Tip, Royce Da 5’9,″ Anderson .Paak, Young M.A. and, perhaps most notably, a posthumous contribution from the late rapper Juice WRLD, Rolling Stone reports.

Em also dropped a music video for “Darkness,” a piano-driven ballad set to a sedated rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” with lyrics that touch on themes of loneliness and imagery that eerily recalls the 2017 Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas.

The video ends with clips pulled from various other mass shooting news broadcasts in America and the message, “When will this end? When enough people care. Register to vote at Vote.gov. Make your voice heard and help change gun laws in America.”

Meanwhile, some Ariana Grande fans are already up in arms about a song off the album that they say makes light of the Manchester Arena bombing, the 2017 terror attack that killed 23 people during one of the “thank u, next” singer’s concerts, reports the New York Post.

Eminem’s new album includes the track “Unaccommodating,” which contains the lyrics: “But I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game/Like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting.”

Eminem also dropped two Instagram posts about the album art, which pays homage to the 1958 record Alfred Hitchcock Presents Music to be Murdered By by film composer Jeff Alexander. The cover features the Detroit-bred rapper holding a revolver and an axe to his head.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7aJBHGhNHc https://www.instagram.com/p/B7aMe1KBH0z

Here’s how Twitter users are reacting to Eminem’s latest release: