As fans mourned via tweeted jokes late Thursday and into Friday morning after something new from Kanye West failed to appear on streaming services, those in Detroit instead prepped to catch him in person by way of a not-held-on-Sunday edition of his Sunday Service experiment.
Tickets for the Detroit edition, which notably occurred the same day Jesus Is King was initially presumed by some to begin its existence, ran fans just $0.00 and were released via Ticketmaster on Thursday. The gathering itself was staged at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre and featured accompaniment by local choir vocalists and others, with the Detroit Free Presspointing out that an open call for choir participants was launched and later closed earlier this week.
As West explained to David Letterman during a special Netflix interview earlier this year, his controversial-to-some approach to the Sunday Service gatherings was inspired by a desire to return to purity in his work.
"We were really light on even giving it a name," he said. "It was just an idea we had to open up our hearts and make music that we felt was as pure and as positive as possible, and just do it for an hour every Sunday and have something where people can come together and feel good with their families."
Experience that from afar via the livestream link below.
As for that album, whatever becomes of Jesus Is King will mark the first solo release from the generational icon since last year's built-on-brevity Ye. While the contents of that seven-tracker arguably amounted to the most underwhelming moments in West's otherwise impenetrable discography, the Kid Cudi collab project he released that same summer—Kids See Ghosts—stands as some of his strongest work to date.
At one point, we were expecting Yandhi to be the Ye follow-up. As well-cataloged fan frustrations can attest, that did not come to pass.
