The Roots Plan New Album for December

Everyone's favorite live hip-hop band has taken things back to the recording studio, as it was announced today (October 16) that The Roots will be releasing a new album, undun on December 6.

This will be the first album of the year from the Philly-bred band, which released two last year (How I Got Over and Wake Up! with John Legend). Now known widely for their nightly appearances as the house band on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the crew are back with a studio offering. Drummer ?uestlove had this to say about the project via his Web site, okayplayer.com:

“At this point in our career we’d like for our work to have a unifying theme, and an experiential quality. We’ve been intentionally making our albums shorter in length so that they can be experienced as a continuous work. The music is band-oriented with an eye on the moody cinematic. As a DJ, I am the King of playlists, but I don’t want our albums to feel like a playlist or a mixtape for that matter. We want to tell stories that work within the album format and we want the stories to be nuanced and useful to people. undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn’t born criminal. He’s not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner like Tupac’s character Bishop in “Juice”… he’s actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment… At the end of the day… isn’t that what we all do?”

Earlier today, the lead single from the project, "Make My," featuring Big K.R.I.T., hit the 'net. You can listen here, and view a tracklist for the project below. —Adam Fleischer

01. Sleep
02. Make My
03. One Time
04. Kool On
05. The Jump
06. Stomp
07. Lighthouse
08. I Remember
09. Tip The Scale
10. Redford