Lil Kim hasn’t put out a studio album since 2005, but her new mixtape, Lil Kim Season, might well hint that there may be one on the way.
The 10-song collection — her first new music since 2014’s Hard Core 2k14 — is currently available for free download on Datpiff and includes guest appearances from the likes of Maino and Kevin Gates, as well as Kim’s version of Desiigner’s “Panda.”
“Honestly I’m just having fun making music right now,” Kim told Entertainment Weekly earlier this month, adding that she’s “in the studio every other day.” She also detailed her Kevin Gates collaboration “#Mine”: “I could be cracking jokes on one of my verses then out of nowhere you’re going to hear a sexy line,” she said. “That’s just me. That’s how I talk in real life. But ‘#Mine’ to me has that sexy feel even though it’s still gangsta. It’s gangsta love.”
Kim, who won a Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals Grammy for Lady Marmalade (with Pink, Maya and Christina Aguilera), is returning from a sabbatical she embarked upon since becoming pregnant with her daughter in late 2013.
“For a long time, my focus was my baby,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about music at all, and my focus was just raising my baby. Now that she’s 19 months and she’s going to be two this summer, she’s motivating me to do music again. We play music all the time and she’s always dancing.”
