Isaiah Rashad announces ‘It’s Been Awful,’ his first album in five years, dropping May 1 via TDE. Lead single ‘SAME SH!T’ arrives this Friday
Five years is a long time to hold your breath. On April 7, Isaiah Rashad ended the wait by announcing his fourth studio album, It’s Been Awful, set for release on May 1, 2026 through Top Dawg Entertainment and Warner Records. The announcement arrived via a cinematic trailer that does not ease anyone into anything: a bloodied Rashad stumbles through a field of cows, collapses, examines his wounds, and is ultimately surrounded by two shadowy women before lying motionless as the title and date materialize on screen. It is the most precisely named album in recent memory, and that’s not a coincidence.
The Chattanooga rapper’s last full-length, The House Is Burning, landed in 2021 to wide acclaim, featuring a stacked cast including Lil Uzi Vert, SZA, Smino, Jay Rock, 6LACK, and Duke Deuce. Since then, Rashad has operated in the margins, appearing on collaborations with Kal Banx, Ray Vaughn, and Kembe X while the internet kept a low, obsessive vigil. The rollout for It’s Been Awful began with deliberate, layered ambiguity: cryptic Instagram Story posts, TDE label signees including ScHoolboy Q, Doechii, and Punch flooding social media with the album’s title, and street posters appearing across New York City before any official confirmation dropped. Then came the trailer, and then came the certainty.
A Record Shaped by Pressure, Prince, and OutKast’s Most Experimental Corners
The album’s creative fingerprints have been forming in public for a while. In a Vice interview, Rashad named Fousheé, Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” and Atlanta artist Pluto among his primary inspirations, alongside an explicit debt to OutKast’s Stankonia and The Love Below. “I’m touching more Stankonia and The Love Below more than anything else,” he said. “I would say Top made compromises for the creativity on this one, so I appreciate it.” That last line lands with weight. TDE’s willingness to give Rashad room is the difference between a competent return and something genuinely risky. The creative brief, as described in press materials, positions It’s Been Awful as “trunk-rattling and grounded in his roots” while the visual world around it leans into “a surreal, psychological nightmare where Zay literally battles himself.” The tension between those two descriptions is the whole album waiting to happen.
The lead single, titled “SAME SH!T”, is confirmed to drop on streaming this Friday. A dedicated Instagram account, @itsbeenawful, launched alongside a fully redesigned website that also features a poster for an It’s Been Awful Tour, signaling that the rollout is not a quiet one. Rashad also posted a pointed message to his Instagram Stories after the announcement: “Everybody wanna see you crash out, fall off and burn out all for their entertainment.” A line that summarizes, with surgical concision, exactly what the album title is already doing.
The Comeback That Rap Conversation Has Been Waiting For
The stakes around this release are real and not entirely musical. Following the 2022 leak of a private video that showed Rashad in intimate encounters with men, a moment he addressed from the Coachella stage and later responded to by identifying as sexually fluid, his absence from music took on a dimension beyond the typical creative hiatus. He was navigating something publicly and privately at the same time. That context does not disappear when the album arrives, but it does give the title a meaning that cuts deeper than the usual comeback phrasing. It has been awful. He is saying so directly.
Fan response to the announcement has been immediate and charged. “Are we really going for a FOURTH consecutive CLASSIC???” one user posted on X. Another offered the more resigned acknowledgment: “Finally. This mf always wanna take 5 years to drop.” Both reactions capture something true. Following his It’s Been Awful release, Rashad is also set to hit the road for the second leg of his Cilvia Demo 10th anniversary shows, a run he first launched in 2024. The full tracklist and features have not yet been confirmed. But the trailer, the timing, the title, and the four-word Instagram post from every relevant corner of TDE have already done most of the work. May 1 is a date worth circling.
