Yandhi is a scrapped, unreleased album by Kanye West. Originally scheduled to be released on September 29, 2018, the album generated significant anticipation among fans and would eventually become Kanye's most infamous unreleased project. However, the album's release was repeatedly pushed back, indefinitely postponed, and eventually abandoned in favor of JESUS IS KING.
The album is infamous for never having been released. However, through leaks, a large amount of content from the Yandhi sessions has been released online, with hundreds of versions of tracks being available online for fans to listen to and create their own versions of Yandhi.
Background[]
Production for Yandhi began in earnest in the summer of 2018 whilst working on Good Ass Job with Chance the Rapper, which is when the first version of Hurricane originated. Upon hearing the beat to "Hurricane", Kanye became inspired to create a whole new album titled Yandhi. With the album's concept in his mind, Kanye and his producers began frenzied work as they developed multiple new songs throughout September 2018.
On September 27, 2018, Kanye posted a tweet which announced that he was releasing a new album entitled Yandhi and that it would release two days later on September 29, with Yandhi being a portmanteau of Ye and Mahatma Gandhi, similar to Yeezus. The album's artwork also alludes to the minimalist design of the Yeezus album cover, this time being of a Muji 80 MiniDisc rather than a CD. The tweet coincided with him being a musical guest for SNL. A very early version of Hurricane was played in the announcement video.
The album failed to release, only to have Kim Kardashian announce that it would come out on November 23 shortly afterward. Ye eventually went to Uganda and worked on the album there, only to return in November and announce that the album was delayed indefinitely. West recruited a wide range of collaborators for the project, including Kid Cudi, Ty Dolla $ign, Young Thug, Nicki Minaj, Ant Clemons and 070 Shake, among others.
Animated cover for Yandhi featured in the original teaser.
After Kanye delayed Yandhi indefinitely, he began working with record producer Timbaland to create "more healing music" for the album. Shortly after the announcement of the delay, Kanye underwent a sudden and dramatic conversion towards born-again evangelical Christianity, debuting the Sunday Service Choir at the start of 2019. The creation of the choir coincided with the songs on Yandhi taking a new Christian lyrical focus.
Eventually, the album would morph into the thoroughly Christian JESUS IS KING by mid-2019, which contained three tracks from Yandhi ("Chakras", "The Storm" and "Law of Attraction") that were reworked into the tracks "Selah", "Everything We Need", and "Use This Gospel," respectively.
Legacy[]
The song "We Got Love" was originally considered for Teyana Taylor's K.T.S.E., but it did not appear on that album. It was later added to Yandhi (appearing on the SNL tracklist), but it was finally released as part of Teyana Taylor's next album in 2020.
After years, one of the most anticipated tracks from Yandhi, Hurricane, was played at the first Donda listening party with similar production to the original. This track had actually been worked on through DONDA: WITH CHILD, adding feature Lil Baby. The final version would go on to have significantly different production than the original, adding vocals from The Weeknd.
New Body would also later be played at the first listening party for the collab album “VULTURES 1” by ¥$ (Kanye West & Ty Dolla $ign) with minor changes. Nicki Minaj has commented that she probably will not clear her verse for the song, saying “That train has left the station… no disrespect in any way”. According to Ye, Ice Spice recorded for the song shortly after, but her team wouldn't clear it.
While other tracks such as Alien would eventually resume development to some degree in DONDA: WITH CHILD sessions, they have still not released.
Other[]
Unlike some of his other tweets, the Yandhi announcement tweet with "Hurricane" playing remained on the site as of December 12th, 2021.[1], until his suspension in December 2022.
Track lists[]
Main article: Yandhi/Tracklists