Mike Will Made-It is dropping his first solo album in seven years — and hitting reset. On Friday, the legendary rap producer released the single “high3r” featuring heavyweights Lil Wayne and Lil Yachty, off his upcoming LP, R3SET.
“Sometimes you just gotta hit the reset button,” Mike Will tells Rolling Stone of the LP. “R3SET to me doesn’t mean starting over, it means setting up to Release All New Songs Orchestrated by Me again.” (The capitalization in his quote are a reference to his debut album in 2014, Ransom.)
“We’re in the middle of a cultural renaissance, and after losing my hard drives I realized that my challenges came right on time,” he adds. “I’m excited to share the new wave.”
In an Instagram post the day before the release of “high3r,” Mike Will teased how he’d take risks on the new LP and “set new standards.” He wrote, “I’ve always been and always will be that producer who puts together the waves we’ve never experienced.”
Earlier this week, the producer shared a video trailer for the album featuring surveillance footage from the studio, featuring appearances from Chief Keef, Rich the Kid, Kodak Black, J. Cole, Future, and Lil Baby. He also reflected on stepping away from making music after 2018, before deciding it was time to get back in the studio. “I tapped out for a second when all my hard drives got stolen in 2018, then I realized I am the hard drive,” he wrote on X.
Mike Will’s last solo album came in 2017 with Ransom 2, the follow-up to 2014’s Ransom. Since then, he’s made more collaboration-focused albums and led the Creed 2 soundtrack in 2018. He released the collaborative LP Gotti Made-It with Yo Gotti in 2017, and paired up with Trouble on 2018’s Edgewood. This year, he dropped an 18-track album alongside Chief Keef, titled Dirty Nachos.
“Where we’re at with music, people want to know more about the producer. More people are interested in how beats are made; how the song is put together,” Mike Will told Rolling Stone last year as part of the magazine’s Future of Music issue. “It’s just like food. If the food’s not put together well, it’s not going to taste good. When [music is] not being put together well, it’s not going to sound good.”
“Some people have more experience than others, and some people have better taste than others,” he added. “I feel like that’s where the magnifying glass starts coming out on, ‘Damn, how is this produced? Who put it together?’”