DJ Khaled! He the best music! Khaled is a fundamentally silly figure, and his whole approach of rounding up extremely famous people to appear on songs together does not hit the way that it once did. These days, he seems to mostly exist to put out corporate-branded slop like his terrible Smurfs song. But Khaled apparently still has the ability to pull together artists whose presence on a song together feels like a big deal in one way or another. He’s just done that on two new singles — one that teams a post-genre pop star with a troubled rap supernova and another that assembles a multi-generational supergroup of dancehall reggae legends.
DJ Khaled has a new album called Aalam Of God on the way, and he just shared two new tracks. The more obviously splashy one is “Brother,” which features the two biggest rap-adjacent artists currently living in Utah. Post Malone, was never a rapper, exactly, but he was in that world enough that he appeared alongside Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Baby, and DaBaby on DJ Khaled’s song “I Did It” four years ago. These days, Posty is full country, but Khaled got him to join forces with NBA YoungBoy on “Brother,” an acoustic-guitar track about fraternal devotion.
NBA YoungBoy (now officially just YoungBoy apparently) has been siloed off from the rest of the music world for many years, living under house arrest while facing a great many criminal charges. He was sentenced to 23 months in federal prison last year, but Donald Trump pardoned him in May. Now, he’s getting ready to head out on an arena tour, and his album MASA came out last month. On “Brother,” Posty sings and YoungBoy raps, and they kind of make sense together. The song’s “official visualizer” is howlingly ugly AI slop. Here, look:
The other new DJ Khaled track is “You Remind Me,” a beach-party dancehall track built on a sample of Gyptian’s “Hold Yuh.” It’s way more notable for the collection of people involved than for the song itself. Last year, dancehall megastar Vybz Kartel’s murder conviction was overturned, and he was freed after a decade in prison. On “You Remind Me,” Kartel joins forces with a bunch of significant figures from his career. There’s his hero Buju Banton, another dancehall artist who has done significant prison time. There’s Bounty Killer, who once served as a Kartel mentor before the two developed a heavy rivalry. And then there’s Mavado, another onetime Kartel collaborator who feuded seriously with Kartel before Kartel’s prison term started. RoryStoneLove and Kaylan Arnold also appear on the song. The video features a whole lot of shirtless DJ Khaled. See for yourself.
“Brother” and “You Remind Me” are out now on Republic.