In terms of album launches, this is up there with the greats. When Nine Inch Nails released Year Zero in a video game it was cool for nerds, and Wu Tang dropping one single hardcopy of Once Upon a Time in the Shaolin was peak purism, but Kanye has just pulled off one of the best album launches — of all time.
A 15-year-old Calabasas resident named Braxtyn happened upon the album while pulling a stunt for Instagram engagement. Employing an age-old social media tactic of copying shit that other people do, Braxton’s yandhi_yeet account takes the product dissection popularised by What’s Inside and rehashes it with a Yeezy bent. Hacking through 350s, proved no problem, but when he took his saw to the new ‘Geode’ 700 V2s he got more than he bargained for.
Through DM, Braxtyn explained what happened. ‘I just felt it catch’ he said, ‘BOOST is like butter, so I knew tings [sic] weren’t gucci when the blade stopped.’
Unbelievably, what he’d felt was a USB containing Kanye’s much-delayed Yandhi album. ‘I pull it out and it’s this USB and I’m like, damn, you know, it’s not even Thunderbolt. What am I meant to do with this?’
Braxtyn initially thought about tossing the relic, but then he saw Yandhi branding on the stick and decided it might have resale value. He plugged it into a school computer and discovered something rarer than ‘College Dropout’ S. Carter Lows on shelves at Sportie LA.
You might be wondering: why on Ye’s green earth was Yandhi tucked away in the latest Yeezy release? According to sources close to Kanye, he got the idea from Beaverton’s fash-tech merger, Nike+. His view that they copied his 700 design for the M2K Tekno led him to want to take something of theirs and revolutionise it. Apparently, the logistical problems with pulling this off were why Kanye missed the original September 29 launch date.
Only 50 pairs of Geodes brought from Kanye’s recent lemonade stands have the USBs in them, and patrons can check if they’ve got the golden ticket by looking under their insoles. So far, Braxtyn is the only one to come forward.
Braxtyn is yet to upload the album to the internet, as he is hoping to trade the USB for a pair of Pharrell’s Chanel NMDs and the glow-in-the-dark Yeezy 750s. He admits that haters will say it’s Photoshop, but has shared a screenshot of the track list as proof.
When asked how Yandhi sounded, he said, ‘It’s not quite “Sicko Mode” level’, but that ‘Pusha has dope fish scale bars’ in song two. The only other things Braxtyn would confirm were that Rick Rubin’s interlude links Yandhi to Kanye’s last 10-track album, Yeezus, and that the track list holds a hidden meaning.
More on this story as it unravels.
