If you’ve been paying any attention to Jermaine Lamarr Cole aka J. Cole’s social media platform within the last week you would know that his upcoming album is going to be Epic! Cole took to Twitter on 5/4 to Tweet, “Is this thing on?” followed by the announcement of the release date for his long anticipated album. Cole announced that his upcoming album, which is his 6th studio album titled The Off-Season will be released on 5/14.
The news didn’t stop there. In anticipation of the album, Cole dropped a single and made the announcement via social media on 5/7. Cole made a post revealing the title, Interlude, with the caption, “Told myself I would drop the album all at once … New song tonight. 12 o’clock.” The 2 minute song produced by himself, T-Minus and T.Parker, with catchy beat and familiar flow was enough to get fans excited for his upcoming project. But wait … there’s more, on 5/10 Cole dropped a 12 min, 4-Chapter documentary to YouTube called, Applying Pressure: The Off-Season Documentary.
This is Cole’s second documentary. If you recall, he also produced a documentary to accompany his 4 Your Eyez Only album. In the documentary, Cole inspirationally speaks on his struggle to “Fight against comfort.” He can be seen speaking with 21 Savage in the beginning of the documentary reflecting on the start of his career and his relationship with complacency. In the documentary Cole speaks on what the title The Off-Season means to him and how he had to push past being comfortable at this point in his career. He said,
“I had to make a real decision … are you okay getting comfortable chilling, mailing it in, waiting around on inspiration… When I thought about that feeling, I thought “nah, I’m not cool with that.'”
Although Cole has released a few singles in the last couple of years, he has not released an album since his 2018, KOD. He expresses in the documentary, “When you put yourself in uncomfortable moments you find out a lot about yourself.” He also mentions his struggle with inspiration when it came to writing for the album. He says, “When you don’t write for a while you wait around for inspiration … you can wait forever and nothing will ever come.”
Thankfully for Cole fans, he was able to push past his complacency to produce The Off-Season while also hinting about the coming of his next project The Fall Off. Cole took to Twitter today to give us the preview of the track list check it out here.
