Westside Gunn "ZILLA" [SINGLE]

The video came first, back in late August, on Gunn's own channels. The single arrived properly in October, and it carries the announcement with it: HEELMATIC, sixteen tracks, out in November through Griselda Records and Mass Appeal his first release with Mass Appeal, the label whose Legend Has It series reportedly talked him out of whatever he had been planning instead. Denny LaFlare produced it. The two go back years; Gunn told an interviewer in 2022 that he thought of LaFlare and Conductor Williams as family and wanted them around him rather than just receiving beats in an email, which is a specific thing for an artist to say about producers and explains why this partnership keeps returning. Critics have described the beat variously as "lurching" and "sputtering" and as "droning," with Gunn's customary "boom, boom, boom, boom" threaded through it those are their words, not ours; the audio is not in front of us. The video was shot in Egypt, which is not a location Gunn has any obvious claim on: him at the Great Pyramid, on a camel, around Cairo. He has said he made the album while moving sessions near the Eiffel Tower, near the Acropolis in Athens, at the Saucony offices, in Berlin and Chicago and that the result is "grimey, dusty, raw, mixed w/ jazz but it sounds like gospel." Whether or not it does, the travel is in the record's DNA, and shooting a video at the pyramids is consistent with an album assembled in airports. The line people picked up on is a streetwear complaint: "Virgil rolling in his grave, they got Off-White in Costco." There is also a Waymo drive-by and a Jeff Bezos reference, which is to say Gunn is still writing about money the way a man who remembers not having it writes about money. It is track three on the album.

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