Isaiah Rashad released It’s Been Awful on Friday May 1, 2026, his third studio album, the follow-up to The House Is Burning that fans have been waiting five years for, and a 16-track, 54-minute statement about what those five years actually looked like from the inside.
It is out now on Top Dawg Entertainment and Warner Records.
The album was not announced with a standard rollout. In March 2026, people who placed orders through the TDE website began receiving a small notecard that read “It’s Been Awful” on the front.
On the back, “Everybody wants to see you crash out, fall off, and burn out for their entertainment. I just want to see you smile.”
Rashad reposted the notecards on Instagram. By the time the official trailer arrived on April 7, the phrase had already been living in the fan community for weeks, not as a title reveal but as a feeling they recognized.
The lead single “Same Sh!t” dropped April 9. The full tracklist followed later that month.
Then the album itself dropped Friday, with a sold-out Los Angeles concert the same night where Rashad performed the songs live for the first time. Tickets sold out in minutes.
What’s The Album About?
It’s Been Awful is 16 tracks and 54 minutes, relatively lean for an album that was five years in the making, and deliberately so.
Rashad made a choice to keep the feature count small and the scope personal. Where The House Is Burning spread across a larger cast of collaborators, It’s Been Awful keeps the outside voices to three: SZA, Dominic Fike and Julian Sintonia.
The full tracklist is as follows.
- The New Sublime
- M.O.M.
- Same Sh!t
- Boy in Red feat. SZA
- Supaficial
- Scared 2 Look Down
- Happy Hour
- Do I Look High? feat. Julian Sintonia
- Ain’t Givin’ Up
- GTKY
- Cameras feat. Dominic Fike
- Act Normal
- 10 States Away
- Nuthin 2 Hide
- Superpwrs
- 719 Freestyle
The album opens on The New Sublime before moving into M.O.M., which stands for “man on a mission,” and the already-released lead single Same Sh!t, with both early tracks focused on family ties and the particular pressure of needing to provide and produce while carrying personal weight.
The 808-driven Same Sh!t is the most immediate entry point for new listeners, a track that establishes Rashad’s current sonic space before the album goes deeper.
What the album goes deeper into is specifically personal. On Ain’t Givin’ Up, Rashad mentions rehab stints, not obliquely but directly. On Act Normal, he processes the compound impact of lust and its consequences. Happy Hour traces the comedown from what preceded it.
These are not vague confessions or artful metaphors designed to obscure the autobiographical content.
They are the account of someone who went through a significant period of difficulty and came out the other side with an album about what that looks like from the inside.
Why The Features Work
The album’s most anticipated collaboration is Boy in Red with SZA, and it delivers on what five albums of shared history between them has built.
This is their sixth song together, following West Savannah, Ronnie Drake, Stuck in the Mud, Pretty Little Birds and Score across both their careers on TDE.
The chemistry between Rashad’s Southern drawl and SZA’s voice has been one of the more consistent pleasures in contemporary R&B and hip-hop, and Boy in Red is described as “deceptively peppy,” a surface brightness that the lyrical content complicates in the way Rashad’s best collaborations with SZA tend to.
Cameras with Dominic Fike is being called out as an album highlight by early listeners. Apple Music’s editorial description called it “the ethereal highlight” of the project, Fike providing melodic support on a track whose atmosphere is described as floating and precise at the same time.
Fike has always been an interesting collaborator for hip-hop artists because his background in alt-pop gives him a sonic perspective that does not typically appear in this lane.
On Cameras, that difference is the whole point.
Julian Sintonia appears as a feature on Do I Look High? and as a key production presence throughout the album, his fingerprints are on a significant portion of the album’s sonic texture, including programming on tracks 1, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 14, with additional work across several others.
He is a relatively unknown name to mainstream audiences but the album is in significant part a showcase for his production range.
What Has Rashad Said About The Album?
In a conversation with Noisey before the album’s release, Rashad described the creative sources that shaped It’s Been Awful in terms that explain both its sound and its ambition.
His primary inspiration was Fousheé, the alternative R&B and pop artist whose intimate, genre-crossing approach to production and vulnerability clearly influenced the album’s texture.
He put Prince’s If I Was Your Girlfriend on repeat for two to three months. He was drawing from Atlanta-based artists PLUTO and BunnaB in the album’s later sections.
The deepest well, he said, was OutKast, specifically Stankonia and The Love Below, the two records that represent the most adventurous ends of that group’s catalog.
Drawing from Stankonia means drawing from crunch and momentum and that specific kind of Southern energy that hits before you have time to think about it.
Drawing from The Love Below means drawing from Prince’s influence on André 3000 and from the idea that a hip-hop album does not have to sound like anything that came before it.
He also said something notable about TDE’s role in making this album: “I would say Top made compromises for the creativity on this one, so I appreciate it.”
That is not a statement most artists make about their labels publicly. It is a statement that suggests the album Rashad wanted to make and the album the label was expecting were not precisely the same thing, and that the version you are hearing is closer to his vision than their initial expectations.
The Five-Year Gap
The House Is Burning came out in 2021 and was received as one of the stronger rap albums of that year, detailed, layered, personal and sonically confident in a way that rewarded repeated listening.
It was also released during a period when Rashad was managing personal challenges that would become more visible the following year.
In 2022, an alleged sex tape involving Rashad leaked online without his consent. He addressed it publicly and directly.
His response, acknowledged and moved past rather than hidden, became, for his fan base, a defining moment in the narrative of who Isaiah Rashad is as a person. He kept working. He kept recording.
He did not disappear. The result of that continued work, across five years of personal processing and musical development, is It’s Been Awful.
The title is doing specific work. It is honest in the way that titles rarely are. It does not claim resolution or arrival. It acknowledges a duration. It says: this is what the time felt like, and now here is the music that came out of it.
The Tour Coming Behind It
Rashad is heading out on tour in support of the album and expressed specific excitement about something he has been working toward for his entire live performance career. a full live band for the entirety of the North American run.
He has done it in Europe before, describing the first time he played with a band alongside drummer Tony Royster Jr., one of Jay-Z’s session musicians, as “the coldest drummer I’ve ever seen, the first time I ever did something like that.”
Making the live band experience available to every show on the American tour, not just select dates, is a production ambition that reflects how seriously he is treating this album cycle.
The Los Angeles release show, which sold out in minutes, gave the first glimpse of what that looks like with the new material.
The full tour details are expected to follow.
It’s Been Awful is out now on all streaming platforms via TDE and Warner Records.
A deluxe edition is in the works, Rashad confirmed in Instagram comments that it will include a feature from Lexa Gates, though no release date has been announced.
