Nas and DJ Premier‘s long-awaited joint album is officially happening — and fans don’t have to wait much longer to hear it.
On Tuesday (November 25), the two hip-hop titans revealed the title, release date and artwork for their eagerly anticipated full-length collaboration.
The project is called Light-Years and will drop on December 12 via Mass Appeal Records.
Check out the cover art below.
Light-Years will mark the seventh and final installment in the label’s Legend Has It… series, which has blessed us with brand new albums from some of New York hip-hop’s finest names throughout 2025.
Slick Rick kickstarted things in June with his comeback LP Victory, before Raekwon (The Emperor’s New Clothes), Ghostface Killah (Supreme Clientele 2), Mobb Deep (Infinite), the late Big L (Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King) and De La Soul (Cabin in the Sky) took the baton.
“It’s 1995 all over again,” Nas, who co-owns Mass Appeal Records, said of the series in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. “Sometimes I feel like 2025 has that feeling. It’s not going backwards, [it’s] going forward, though. It’s that feeling of urgency, that vibration, the celebration of life and these songs and these albums, what they meant 30 years ago. It’s still thriving right now.
“Even from younger people, they’re all derivatives of that early sound. And these artists here, from Slick Rick — he is the reason that all of us even have a pen in our hands. You look at him and you think of Mobb Deep, and you think of Raekwon and Ghostface, De La Soul, [it’s] some of the most different, brave, bold, intelligent hip hop music ever made.”
“And of course, we lost some of our brothers along the way, [but] we’re still representing for them and they’re still representing themselves through the series,” Esco continued. “It’s a celebration of a great impact, a standard that they set that we could never forget because it keeps us aiming higher.
“This series is to encourage [and] inspire hip hop and remind us all [of] the pureness of hip hop. I hope that we all can do this together.”
Light-Years is also the culmination of a legendary and long-running partnership between Nas and DJ Premier, who have made countless hip-hop classics together over the years, from Illmatic standouts “N.Y. State of Mind” and “Represent” to “Nas is Like” and “2nd Childhood.”
Rumors of the pair joining forces for a full-length album swirled for years until they finally confirmed plans for a project last year along with releasing the lead single “Define My Name.”
Nas recently revealed that in addition to new material, Light-Years will include a handful of older songs that he and Premo recorded when they first discussed making an album together.
“I’m going to say at least two of those ideas happened on this album,” he told Rolling Stone. “We didn’t get a chance to do ’em when we were talking about ’em, but we finally got a chance to put those recordings together this year.”
He added: “I can’t wait for people to finally hear it. I don’t know about anybody else, but for me and him, it was personally a long time coming for us to do it.”
