The long-awaited MacLib album by Mac Miller and MadLib is officially on the way. Madlib joined Talib Kweli on Sway In The Morning to promote Liberation 2, which Mac appears on posthumously. The legendary producer revealed that he’s wrapping up MacLib right now, as well as with a project with Erykah Badu. “Right now, I’m finishing up the Mac Miller album, Planet Asia album, Erykah Badu album, different stuff,” Madlib said. “[Erykah and I] just started on an album … We have a lot of unreleased stuff.”
The fact that there are now plans to release MacLib is a full 180 from previous statements made by Madlib in 2019. A few months after Mac Miller’s passing, the Pinata producer explained that there were no definitive plans to release the project. “The song still doesn’t have an official title, and there are no official plans to release the EP,” Madlib wrote on Rappcats.com shortly after previewing one of their collabs during a DJ set. However, during the interview with Sway, he confirmed that Mac’s family green-lit the release of the highly-anticipated project.
The History Of MadLib: Mac Miller & Madlib’s Relationship
The news of the project’s existence first came to light in 2019 when Thelonious Martin detailed opening up for Madlib. “So I’m trying to focus and DJ, and Madlib gets on and 15 minutes into his set he just randomly plays a Mac Miller joint. And I turn to him, I’m like, ‘There’s more of these, right?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a whole album. Maclib,’” Martin told DJBooth, though that was all we really knew of it at the time.
The two met when working on Freddie Gibbs’ Pinata, leading Madlib to send Mac Miller beats every once and a while. Over time, Mac would send records back, which eventually culminated into an “EP’s worth of music,” according to Madlib’s manager Eothen “Egon” Alapatt. “What exists is what the two had originally intended: an EP’s worth of music that was supposed to be the start of something,” Egon said in 2019. Hopefully, we’ll see the project drop in its entirety at some point this year. Stay tuned for more news on MacLib.