Here’s How J. Cole’s “Immortal” Beat on His ‘4 Your Eyez Only’ Album Was Created

On Dec. 8, J. Cole dropped his highly anticipated album 4 Your Eyez Only. Now, the producer of standout track "Immortal" is showing fans how he made the instrumental.

Cole fans should be familiar with Cardiak, the New Jersey producer who crafted "Love Yourz" for 2014 Forest Hills Drive. Cardiak's latest Cole collaboration is "Immortal," the second track on 4 Your Eyez Only. 

You can check out a behind-the-scenes clip above, in which Cardiak breaks down how he carefully created "Immortal." He explains how he got the sample from Frank Dukes, chopped and sped it up, and then added his own flavor of drums and synths to it. "This beat is real simple, so I look at it as, less is more," Cardiak says.

XXL's Georgette Cline recently spoke with Cardiak about the collab. "You know Cole is known for coming up with different flows, so I was just thinking about the bounce of the kind of track he would rap on, like the actual drum bounce, like the actual drum patterns and all that type of stuff," Cardiak says. "I was just creating different type of drum patterns that depicted his style and that track happened to stick. He spoke about that in the [Eyez] documentary actually, saying “Immortal” has that bounce and that’s what I was really focused on."

Cardiak tells XXL that he didn't even know that Cole wanted the beat for the new album until about a week before it dropped. "I wanna say probably about a week ago," Cardiak says. "He had the beat and he said he wanted it back then but this is 2015, you know, we’re about to be in 2017. So I actually had forgot about it. And then Matt hit me up and he was like, “Hey, you still got that beat” Cole wants to use it.” Nobody knew when he was wanted to drop. Nobody knew anything. Then all of a sudden he came out of nowhere that he was dropping on the 9th."

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