Kanye West announced his Donda stem player back in August, just ahead of the album’s release later that month. Now, fans are finally getting their hands on the $200 device, and discovering that it also includes access to music that didn’t appear on the record’s official tracklist.
Ye’s stem player was originally intended to let users manipulate and remix tracks from the rapper’s tenth studio album. Features include controls to split any song into stems, edit “vocals, drums, bass, and samples”, and loop sections of the song in real-time.
As a bonus, however, the product comes with three unreleased songs, including the André 3000-featuring “Life of the Party”, which was cut from the final album but later leaked by Drake amid his feud with West. The profanity that originally resulted in the track being cut is censored in the newly-released version.
“Never Abandon Your Family”, a scrapped song that was aired during Kanye’s first Donda listening party in Atlanta, also features on the stem player, alongside “Up From the Ashes” (originally recorded for 2019’s Jesus Is King).
Meanwhile, West has shared visuals for a few of the songs from Donda’s official tracklist, including “Donda Chant”, “Come to Life”, and “24”. He’s also continued to wear the face-obscuring masks and balaclavas that defined his listening party “performances”, leaving fans to speculate on their meaning: A meditation on the cult of personality? An attempted retreat from his celebrity lifestyle? We’re not sure.
Listen to some of the previously-unreleased tracks via footage of the Donda stem player below.
