Clipse plays a snippet from Kendrick Lamar’s verse in Chains & Whips 

Clipse has leaked the preview of Kendrick Lamar's verse in Chains & Whips.

The track has yet to make its debut, but Clipse and Pharrell, who serves as its producer, took to Instagram Stories to tease fans wth a preview. The song is set to be featured on the duo's reunion and comeback album, Let God Sort Em Out. In the verse, K.Dot can be heard spitting the following bars:

“Let’s be clear, Hip Hop died again / Half of my profits may go to Rakim / How many Judases done let me down? / But f*ck it, the West mine’s, we right now.”

However, seemingly overnight, the verse has sparked a wave of controversy, with the hip-hop duo claiming its inclusion culminated in a dispute with Def Jam. Hip Hop DX has reported that the pair has since parted ways with the record label over the same.

Clipse's Pusha T and Malice get candid on why they abandoned their record label for Kendrick Lamar

As reported by Hip Hop DX, Pusha T, one-half of the Virginia Beach brothers duo, spoke to GQ Magazine about the events that unraveled when they decided to include Lamar's verse:

“They wanted me to ask Kendrick to censor his verse, which of course I was never doing. And then they wanted me to take the record off. And so, after a month of not doing it, Steve Gawley, the lawyer over there, was like, ‘We’ll just drop the Clipse.’ But that can’t work because I’m still there [solo]. But [if] you let us all go… ”

He also admitted that it felt good to see other record labels competing to buy the project. He told the Rolling Stone:

“I think just the connection of the parties… The Clipse and [Kendrick] doing the song together was a little bit too much for them, and what they’re going through with their lawsuits.” He added, “I felt like the verse was clean, fair game, just good raps.”

No Malice, his partner, chimed in, noting that it was an “incredible” verse that Lamar “overdid" in a good way.

Genius has reported that the forthcoming album is the fifth official collaboration between Pusha T and Malice, as part of the hip-hop duo that officially disbanded in 2010. It is due this July 11 via Jay-Z's Roc Nation, though it was initially expected to drop in the summer of 2024.

Clipse's longtime manager, Steven Victor, told Billboard:

“If you’re an artist, your whole life is to create art and put it out. If someone’s telling you that you can’t do that, or you have to do it within the confines of whatever box they put you in, that’s like creative jail.”

He also told the outlet that the pair shelled out an exorbitant amount of money — somewhere in the seven-figure range — to buy out of their contract with their former record label while keeping their album safe:

"They said, ‘Find another deal, and let’s figure out a business.’ They didn’t drop us. They were like, ‘Pay us this money’ — which was an exorbitant amount of money, a shit ton of money — ‘and we’ll let you out the deal.’ That’s what happened. We paid them the money, an insane amount of money. It wasn’t, like, $200,000. It was a lot of money for an artist to come up with. They bought themselves out of the deal.”

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Early singles from the album, including Ace Trumpets and So Be It, are already hits, and the latter even takes shots at Travis Scott.

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