Even if you are one of the more casual hip hop fans out there, you’ve most likely heard of J. Cole and his label Dreamville Records. The label was founded by Cole and Ibrahim Hamad in their native North Carolina. The label has many artists signed to it, including J.I.D, Bas, Cozz, Omen, Ari Lennox, and EarthGang. Dreamville also houses producers including Cam O’bi, Childish Major, Cedric Brown, and many more. 

Initial hype

The label had released previous compilations Revenge of the Dreamers and Revenge of the Dreamers II in 2014 and 2015 respectively. These projects here hailed as pretty good by fans, but they felt like something was missing. Many fans felt that Dreamville was missing out on a big opportunity by failing to use their many industry connections to get other artists to feature on the projects. But in early 2019, that seemed to change completely with the announcement of Revenge of the Dreamers III. It looked like Cole and the gang were serious about building a lot of hype and creating a great project.     

Artist invites

On January 6th, J. Cole went on Twitter and announced the project with a poster that looked like an invitation to some recording sessions. The dates for the sessions were January 6-16th and were held in Atlanta. These dates were chosen due to the tour schedules of Dreamville artists.

After Cole’s initial announcement on January 6th, many different artists began popping up on social media sites with their invitations to the recording sessions. There were over 100 artists and producers invited to the sessions including most notably 6lack, Akon, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Big KRIT, Buddy, Currensy, Isaiah Rashad, Lil Baby, Meek Mill, Reason, Rick Ross, Saba, Ski Mask the Slump God, Smino, Syd, Tay Keith, and Vince Staples, among many more. 

The recording sessions came and went and it is said that there were actually over 300 invites in one studio with 142 songs recorded and almost 260GB worth of music. That is an absolutely insane amount of content and it really put fans on edge to hear the project when it was released.

Final project

Early in the week of July 1st J. Cole made another announcement, one that fans had really been waiting for. He announced the Revenge of the Dreamers III would be released on July 5th, 2019. This immediately raised the hype levels through the roof and kept fans on edge until the day it came out.

According to Dreamville, the final project contains 18 songs with 34 artists and 27 producers. That leaves over 100 songs that fans will not be able to hear for the time being.

Regardless, this project had an amazing rollout and recording process. It seems to be one of the most unique projects that I’ve come across thus far and I can’t wait to listen to it even more. 

Revenge of the Dreamers III is now available on music streaming platforms! Hit me up on my Instagram once you’ve listened and let me know what you think of the album.

K-UTE Radio/University of Utah does not own any of the images in this piece.