Kendrick Lamar And Baby Keem Link Up For Bon Iver-Sampling Banger 'The Hillbillies'

Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem have joined forces once more, with the bar-spitting cousins flexing their charm on a bristly new single called The Hillbillies.

Lamar and Keem first worked together on the former’s Black Panther soundtrack album in 2018, when Keem co-wrote and produced the Zacari song Redemption Interlude. Lamar then featured on two songs from Keem’s 2021 debut album, The Melodic Blue (Range Brothers and Family Ties), before recruiting Keem for the song Saviour on his own latest album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers (with Keem also co-writing the tracks N95 and Die Hard).

Produced by Evilgiane, the new beat samples the Bon Iver song PDLIF – a standalone single they released in 2020 – and has Lamar and Keem go back-and-forth on their lavish spending habits and lifestyle choices, waxing lyrical about how they’re “gon' fuck up the world”.

In the song’s memorable refrain, Keem raps: “Messi, get them girls off the stage, 'cause somebody's gonna get taken / Somebody’s gonna invade on a one-to-one conversation / I’m ducked off from the world, I'm immersed in the PlayStation / And I ain't worried 'bout her, it's a thousand hers out waitin'.”

The Hillbillies was released alongside a retro-styled music video directed by Neal Farmer (via Lamar’s production company pgLang), comprised of clips from Lamar’s recent tour with Keem. You can take a look at that below.

Earlier this month, Lamar teamed up with Beyoncé for a new version of her fan-favourite Renaissance song America Has A Problem, taking up the first minute or so with a fiery verse about how there’s “too much complexity to learn me from Google”.

Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers arrived last May as Lamar’s fifth studio album, following on from 2017’s DAMN. It absolutely dominated the ARIA Charts upon its release, and was itself followed last October with a 10th anniversary edition of Lamar’s debut album, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.