Just Blaze opened the vault Monday (Oct. 23) and unearthed two songs from a never-released Slaughterhouse album as a way to pay tribute to The 45 King.
Blaze had previously discussed the unreleased album on Snoop Dogg‘s GGN show back in November 2015, nearly eight years ago. “Now that I’m back off the road for a bit, I’m wrapping up the new Slaughterhouse album,” he told Snoop at the time. “So, we’re in the last phases of that now. We’re mixing. We got about another week’s worth of mixing left. And then hopefully that’ll be out to the world by the end of the year.” The album never came out.
But on Monday, he shared on X (formerly known as Twitter) that he had “just found the slaugherhouse album” and “might do the lords work.” He delivered on his promise an hour later by uploading an 11-minute video containing two unreleased songs onto his YouTube account. And it sounds like fans could hear even more of the LP later on. “45 king didn’t die for us to hold on to a bunch of Music. More to come eventually,” Just Blaze wrote in a follow-up message.
The 45 King (real name Mark Howard James) — who’s well known for his work on Eminem‘s “Stan,” Jay-Z‘s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” and Queen Latifah‘s breakout album All Hail the Queen — recently died at age 62.
“There is no way to summarize the impact and importance of DJ Mark the 45 King in one tweet, thinkpiece or story. He gave us so much, yet asked for so little, but deserved everything,” Just Blaze tweeted Oct. 21. “This man would text me every month ‘Just checking in! Good luck on your upcoming projects!’ Every few weeks without fail. I don’t even know how he got my number and I didn’t care. The fact that one of my godfathers knew my name and cared what I was doing was enough for me.”
Check out the two songs Just Blaze shared on YouTube: