untitled unmastered. Review

Kendrick released this without warning in March 2016: eight tracks left over from the To Pimp a Butterfly sessions, named only by number and the date each was recorded. Two had already surfaced on television, one on The Colbert Report in December 2014 and another on The Tonight Show in January 2016. It went straight to number one and critics loved it, but it is exactly what the title says: work that was never mastered and never shaped into an album.

The fragments are often superb. Terrace Martin, Sounwave, Cardo and Thundercat keep the free jazz and funk of the parent record, the guests run from Thundercat and SZA to Jay Rock, Bilal and CeeLo Green, and untitled 07, the lone single, is the nearest thing to a finished song.

What holds it at a C is the form. Songs stop rather than end, verses drift into studio chatter, and the thirty four minutes play as a folder of ideas rather than a sequence. As a record of how To Pimp a Butterfly was made it is fascinating; as an album to put on, it is a sketchbook.