King Mez Is Dropping an EP Soon

Dr. Dre's new album  Compton debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, selling 295,000 equivalent album units (of which 276,000 are pure sales). A standout guest artist off the project was King Mez who's featured on three songs ("Talk About It," "Satisfiction" and "Darkside/Gone"). XXL recently caught up with Mez who said he's gearing up to release his new EP really soon. "I’m working on my EP," he told XXL over the phone. "It probably won’t be too long [until it drops]. Dre has been helping me with it. It’s coming out real good. I haven’t been working on it very long. Throughout the process of me working with Dre, there may have been amazing songs that may not have fit Dre’s album but fit mine, the sound of my music. The sound of my project is completely different. It’s definitely exciting. Throughout the process I was working on my own stuff, too, but now I’m really getting focused on it."

The North Carolina MC's last project was Long Live the King, an album he released digitally last year. For Compton, Mez shared with us that he wrote 12 of the 15 songs—excluding the intro—off the LP. Writing for other artists was something K.M. has never done before but as time passed, he became more comfortable with the task.

"You know what’s interesting? The more time has gone, the more comfortable and confident I become, especially after a deal like this where a Dr. Dre-level person is invested in my talent and my career," Mez said. "I’ve come to a point where all it really takes is for me to be comfortable [and] I can just come up with whatever I need to come up with right then and there. I really don’t write things down as much as I used to. It really just depends on the ordeal. As long as I’m in the studio, I really don’t have to write things down very much. Dre has a very good engineer, so I can just record whatever I’m thinking. Sometimes I just record the cadence first and I listen back to that and I feel it in with words. Or sometimes I just record words and I change the cadence of the words. It really just depends. A lot of people don’t know but I wrote for Puffy’s new album throughout the process for writing with Dre. So I had a really busy summer. I only wrote for Puffy a couple of songs and I’m not even sure if it's going to be an on the album, but I know for sure that I wrote for him a couple."