“I know the album was supposed to be out today … but we had to push the album back due to a problem,” Wayne said in a YouTube “public service announcement”. “I got too many songs recorded and I worked on it way too much, way too much, to give y’all just half of it.”At the moment, Tha Carter V is at least 31 songs long. “If I dropped the album today it would have to be [cut to] like 12 or 13 songs,” Wayne explained. “And I refuse to do it. I refuse to cheat my fans. I refuse to cheat myself.”Instead, the fifth volume in his Carter series will itself be divided into two volumes. The first part is due on 9 December; its first single, Gotti, dropped yesterday. “Stay tuned for the next part,” he said. “It’s gonna be crazy … You’re gonna love it. Cos I fuckin’ love it and if you don’t fuckin’ love it then you don’t love love.”
Tha Carter V was originally due out in 2013, two years after the preceding volume. “I personally plan on this being my final solo album and it’s definitely the final Carter album,” he declared the following year – though “25 to 35 million [dollars] would get me to do another solo album after this”. Since then, Wayne has often complained about a surfeit of material. “Either Tha Carter V’s gonna be 93 songs or we gonna have to figure this out,” he said in June.
Wayne’s last major release, Tha Carter IV, reached No 8 on the UK chart. The 32-year-old has sold more than 15 million albums in the US alone and recently appeared on hit singles by Busta Rhymes, Chris Brown and Nicki Minaj.
