Lil Yachty shocked the world with his Let’s Start Here psychedelic rock album, and now he’s gearing up to make another creative pivot with his next body of work. Lil Boat revealed on Tuesday (Feb. 13) that he’s readying a genre-blending joint project with James Blake titled Bad Cameo.
“I think James has worked with a quite substantial amount of hip-hop artists,” Yachty said in a clip posted to Instagram. “But this project is so left for both of us. Then, aside from the one picture that James posted, which he doesn’t have many followers actually, I don’t think people know that we know each other exist.”
While they are yet to release anything together in an official capacity, Blake is no stranger to the hip-hop world, as he’s earned recent production credits working on Kanye West’s Vultures 1 and Travis Scott’s Utopia.
Fans figured that Blake and Lil Yachty could have something in the stash when a photo of them in the studio went viral last March. The British singer-songwriter detailed meeting up with the “Poland” rapper months later in an interview with DIY Magazine.
“[Yachty and I] had been working on something, and it just happened that he was in London. I asked him if he fancied going out to a club. I don’t think he probably knew what it would be like,” Blake said. “He happened to turn up at exactly the moment that the Ragga Twins came on stage. Suddenly, he was just stood there like, ‘Oh f—ing hell, this is a bit different.’”
Yachty dropped his “Cold Sunday” single earlier this month, and has notched guest verses with Kid Cudi, Chief Keef, Faye Webster and Fred Again in 2024.
Let’s Start Here arrived in January 2023, and debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 with 36,000 album-equivalent sales in the first week.
“I did what I really wanted to do, which was create a body of work that reflected me,” Yachty told Billboard in his cover story of the solo album last year. “My idea was for this album to be a journey: Press play and fall into a void.”
Watch Yachty announce Bad Cameo below.