After four years of silence, Mr. Folarin returns with vulnerability and fire
Wale is back. The Washington, D.C. wordsmith has officially announced his next studio album, Everything Is a Lot, set to drop November 14 via Def Jam. After a four-year break from full albums, this feels like both resurrection and reckoning.
We last saw Wale in his Folarin II era, bringing J. Cole collaborations, silky flows, and confident bars. But in his Instagram reveal, he peeled back that armor. He spoke of carrying the weight of “everything”; industry changes, personal growth, fears, relationships, identity. That heaviness becomes the album’s core tension.
No features have been confirmed yet, though Wale teased production credits from BNYX, Salaam Remi, Kel-P Vibes, Go Grizz, Streetrunner, Emil, Genio and more. The tracklist has 16 titles, raw and suggestive: Conundrum, Mirroronnabenz, City On Fire, Survive, Lonely. The names alone hint at internal war zones and emotional landscapes.
This is not the Wale who just drops hits. This is the Wale who wants to speak to his own storms. He said he needed to purge what he could not change, make sense of a shifting industry that sometimes forgets its architects, and rekindle purpose in what feels like a thankless space. He even called out the wild, “new niggas actin like I’m a new nigga”, reminding listeners that history and respect aren’t automatic.
Wale is reminding us that even established names feel pressure, dislocation, erasure. Everything Is a Lot promises transparency over polish, vulnerability over spectacle.
Mark November 14. That’s more than an album release. It’s an introduction for the Wale who has lived, been doubted, changed, and is now ready to translate that into sound. This time we aren’t just fans. We’re witnesses.
