M. Mendez

Kid Cudi hit up The Alchemist in the fall with a request to get together and work on an album – and it looks like his wish is being granted.

Taking to Instagram on Friday (January 19), the famed producer shared a photo of him and Cudi in the lab with nothing but a rocket emoji as his caption.

The photo arrives just after the release of Cudi’s new album INSANO, proving that he remains in a great creative space as far as making music is concerned. The studio session also stands in stark contrast with his 2022 announcement he’d be retiring, which, he recently explained to Zane Lowe, came from a feeling of being “out of it.”

“I was kind of out of it,” he said when asked about the retirement talk. “I was just in this place where I was thinking about my future and it just didn’t seem like there was really an appetite for my music in the ways that it used to be.”

He continued: “I finally got through that whole retirement thing because I talked to my friend Brian – the world knows him as KAWS – and he was like, ‘Hey man, I don’t mean to get in your business, but I think that you should rethink this retirement thing. I think you could be around for a long time.’

“And to see Brian come to me real, like – and he’s never approached me about my music or talked to me about my music ever before –  it hit me in a different way. And literally after that message, I was like, shit man, he’s right. I’m just getting warm.”

Elsewhere in his conversation with Lowe, Kid Cudi credited Kendrick Lamarwith inspiring his new album.

Cudi explained how watching Kendrick perform in Paris on The Big Steppers Tour made him realize what type of sonic direction he wanted to take.

“I was really at a place where I had a goal,” he said. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve done all these different types of albums, I’ve touched on all the different types of spaces creatively, sonically. What is the one thing that I haven’t accomplished?’

“And I was still in this place tryna figure out what that album would sound like. I was in Paris, I just finished my European run of tour and I go to see Kendrick. And this muthafucka, it blew my fucking mind.”

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