Ye knows how to sell. The Jesus Walks rapper’s highly anticipated album Bully is already generating buzz, and the rapper has raised the stakes by comparing the project to one of the most iconic albums of all time: Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
It all went down during an appearance on Justin Laboy’s The Download podcast, Ye shared his thoughts on Bully, describing it as his own “Miseducation” and even drawing parallels to Gnarls Barkley’s groundbreaking work. “This is more the way I remember Lauryn Hill’s album, the way I remember Miseducation. I feel it is my Miseducation. It is my Gnarls Barkley album,” Ye explained. “Bully has a title and connotation that a lot of people are anti-bully. But I’m just hyper-next-level frequency right now.”
For Ye, the comparison to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill isn’t just about musical influence but also about the impact of the themes in the album. “You lean on a bar that brings somebody down — that was always rap,” he added, reflecting on the bold and transformative nature of his upcoming work.
Get this, Ye is a longtime admirer of Lauryn Hill, and he famously sampled her track “Mystery of Iniquity” from MTV Unplugged No. 2.0for his 2004 hit “All Falls Down,” although the sample didn’t make it onto the official release. Instead, Syleena Johnson’s vocals were used in its place on The College Dropout version.
When is Bully dropping? The new project is scheduled for release on June 15, 2025; Bully will coincide with the 12th birthday of Ye’s daughter, North West. The rapper recently shared that his daughter reignited his passion for music, saying, “This little girl made me love music again. She asked me to make beats for her. I got back on the ASR, chopped up beats for the album, and chopped every beat with my bare hand for Bully.”
Ye has been teasing several tracks from the album, including “Beauty and the Beast” and “Preacher Man,” as well as new music that surfaced following his headline-making GRAMMY performance with his wife, Bianca Censori. Fans are eagerly awaiting what promises to be a game-changing release.
