MixedByAli On Scrapped Kendrick Lamar Songs: “I Think We Could Put Together Like 6 Albums”

While we all wait for the next Kendrick Lamar album to drop, his engineer, MixedByAli, is teasing us with just how much unreleased heat exists out in the abyss.

In a new interview with Kevin Durant and Eddie Gonzalez on their podcast, The ETCs, Derek “MixedByAli” Ali revealed just how much music Kendrick really leaves on the cutting room floor while making his albums.

Ali has worked with the Compton rapper on every one of his solo albums since 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, but still, he insists he’s worked on a lot more music than what fans have actually gotten to listen to. Not only that, the engineer says there could be around six unreleased albums worth of material that simply didn’t make the cut.

“For Kendrick alone, let me say I think we could put together like six albums,” he said during the latest episode of The ETCs with Kevin Durant. “Everyone’s the same way, it’s all about just understanding that you could always do something better. It’s having that mindset to just strive for the best possible version of you. That’s Kendrick’s whole mind state, always striving to do better. Whether it’s recording a new verse, you know he would record a whole song and get one ad-lib back a month later because he don’t like how he breathed the ad-lib, y’know?”

This isn’t exactly surprising for someone like Kendrick, who takes a long time to create and compile the final products we all know and love. Plus, his Untitled Unmastered project from 2016–which consisted of “throwaways” from To Pimp A Butterfly–just proves how much unreleased heat Lamar has in the chamber.