He gained the confidence to testify about his hardships thanks to the support of his family and friends. He now walks with the slightest of limps.) He shattered his foot and needed all of his front teeth replaced. (He would later give details to Charlemagne in an interview, revealing that he jumped around 50 feet off a freeway overpass by his mother’s house. “It’s my testimony, I guess that’s what I do,” he says. In conversation, he’s vague about what exactly transpired, but he’s candid on Herbert’s DJ Premier-produced cut “Gotta Rap” as he rhymes: “I even tried suicide, and I don’t know why/I know better than most that the soul don’t die/Took a leap, shattered my leg and lost some teeth/But I’m still standing behind every word I speak.” The majority of the album was written before his suicide attempt, but he reworked songs like “Gotta Rap” after. The second time around, several hands prevent him from jumping.īut yes, there was a suicide attempt at some point. The video was inspired by true events, but the song was written before the events the video was inspired by.” In it, after he jumps off the roof, the scene rewinds. It’s not a sad song, it’s to motivate you. “I got out of bed, I went to the studio, and I created something out of it. He adds that therapy, which his mother encouraged him to seek out, helped as well. “I took and I went to work with it, that’s the point,” says Soul of the song. In the song’s video and cover art, he’s shown jumping off a building.

“Got to do better, I got to do better, I got to,” he chants. One of those is the single “Do Better.” Over a haunting sample of a live rendition of Nick Hakim’s “The Green Twins,” Soul looks in the mirror and recounts being stressed, depressed, and stuck in bed as his family grew concerned. And yet, this painful introspective period proved to be a creative gift of sorts, as they resulted in Herbert’s revelatory, soul-baring songs. “We all kinda had to sit with ourselves, in solitude. “ is probably where it was the roughest, where it was the darkest for me,” he murmurs, about the pandemic. During lockdown, he had too much time to think about what he had been going through. A new album was originally ready to go in 2020, but it was derailed by the pandemic. The result is easily his best work to date, a mix of the cocksure wordplay that made him a standout (even alongside acclaimed lyricists like his Black Hippy brethren Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q, and Jay Rock) and deeply personal verses born of his own struggles over the last few years with depression, physical challenges, and the death of a best friend. (The title is a nod to his government name, Herbert Anthony Stevens.) Unlike his more heady, thematically-driven previous albums, he began making this one, his fourth, trying not to overthink everything and beginning with no concept other than to make heartful songs. He’s in Manhattan to promote his first new album in six years, Herbert, which just dropped. He’s excited about more than just his quintessential New York night. Draped in a black hoodie, he shows off DMs with the Nets’ courtside reporter. “The ball is just in my court,” jokes Soul, 35, delighting himself with a double entendre typical of his raps as he kicks his crispy Jordan 4s up on a lobby table and soaks up these fleeting moments of virality on his phone. “Excellent play by him,” said the Nets’ announcer, who might have been even more impressed if he knew Ab-Soul is legally blind. (As a video of the run-in spread, Soul got a text from Charlamagne Tha God jokingly saying that he would have taken the $500K.) The hug came right after Soul saw the Brooklyn Nets play the Washington Wizards at Barclays, where he had a literal highlight: Sitting just behind the net, he caught a tipped pass while holding a drink. On social media, Jay’s greeting, “You young God, what’s up?” made the internet take notice. Lounging in a Lower East Side Manhattan lobby on a nippy December afternoon, the Carson, California rapper Ab-Soul is still feeling electric after a big night in which he bumped into and was embraced by his all-time favorite rapper, Jay–Z.

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