The executive producer of an upcoming collaborative album from Rakim, Kurupt and Masta Killa posted a handwritten tracklist on Instagram on June 7 and confirmed one thing to Rolling Stone in the days after.
The sixth track on the album, listed as an interlude with Jay-Z and Eminem beside it, is real, it is new and it is coming out in August.
Matthew "M80" Markoff, who serves as the A&R and executive producer of the project, told Rolling Stone that the interlude will feature Jay-Z and Eminem paying homage to Rakim's legacy and influence.
It will immediately precede the first solo track that Rakim has produced himself in more than 15 years.
Markoff's Instagram caption when he revealed the tracklist was succinct: "AOTY 2026 - PUT SOME COT DAMN RESPEK ON MY NAME."
The last time Jay-Z and Eminem appeared on the same track was Renegade in 2001, the 16th song on Jay-Z's The Blueprint, the album that turns 25 this year.
Renegade is considered one of the great hip-hop collaborations of its era. Critics at the time noted that Eminem's two verses on the track were among the most technically dazzling performances on an album that was supposed to belong entirely to Jay-Z.
Nas's assessment of the situation, delivered in his 2001 diss track Ether, remains the most memorable critique in that particular conversation. Twenty-five years later, both artists are back on a track together.
The album is packed with hip-hop royalty across every generation.
Rakim, widely regarded as one of the two or three greatest MCs in the history of the form, the person who changed what rap lyricism was capable of when he arrived in 1987, is joined by Kurupt, the West Coast lyricist who built his name with Tha Dogg Pound, and Masta Killa, a core member of the Wu-Tang Clan.
The full guest list adds Snoop Dogg, KRS-One, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Buckshot and Daz Dillinger.
A posthumous executive production credit belongs to Oliver "Power" Grant of Wu-Tang Clan.
The album drops in August. Preorders are available in July.
The Jay-Z and Eminem interlude is not a reunion of convenience or a nostalgia exercise, it is two artists who have been largely absent from collaborative work throughout the past decade being pulled together in service of honoring the rapper who made both of their careers possible by demonstrating what the form could be.