Description
Label Review.
2019 album. Hip-hop. Also available on CD.
Our Overview.
After a hiatus of five years the Australian female rapper, singer-songwriter Iggy Azalea is releasing her new album ‘In My Defense’ and this 2019 release is dedicated to getting back to the dirty South-inspired mixtape roots that die-hard Azaleans came to love before her mainstream introduction.
The 29-year-old hasn't released an album since her commercially successful ‘The New Classic’ debut back in 2014. It's been a treacherous journey for Iggy to get to this point in her career, which included parting ways with Island Records, public breakups, photo leaks and more. After parting ways with Island Records last year and signing with Empire Late last year, she moved from Los Angeles to Atlanta to record the album, which she says is better than most of her previous work. “I’m really proud of my album,” she wrote last year. “It shits on 95% of everything I’ve ever made & its only half done.”
‘In My Defense’ really is that album that’s gonna make you wanna say fuck you to your own reflection for ever doubting you,” she tweeted. The first line of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” encapsulates a very strange, very specific moment in hip-hop history where we worried that rap music and culture were branching out in the bad way, losing the inner-city flavour that birthed them as they trickled out into less diverse, more affluent parts of the country.
“I do mix those [pop] elements, but I don't consider myself a pop star -- I consider myself a rapper; that's how I came in,” said Azalea. “With ‘In My Defense’, I wanted to hit back sonically and say, ‘Well, in my defense: I am a rapper, this is my rap project,’ and ‘In my defense: these are my roots, this is my sound, and it's not what [mainstream] thinks.’ It's not supposed to be so literal.”
“All of the mixtape fans have something new that they can love as much as they loved the earlier stuff,” she says of her latest project, which was largely produced by frequent collaborator J. White Did It. She says the album should bring back memories of her mixtapes, 2011’s ‘Ignorant Art’ and 2012’s ‘TrapGold’. “A lot of those [fans] really still rode for me and were happy for my mainstream success, but I don't think that they really felt satisfied with [‘The New Classic’]. ‘In My Defense’ is a little more polished, but this sounds like the same girl from those tapes. That's what I wanted, and I'm really happy with it.”