50 Cent shared an Instagram photo Tuesday afternoon that says, "Lloyd Banks Officially Off G-Unit Records."
Four months after 50 admitted that he stopped speaking with his longtime fellow G-Unit member, he posted the photo with a suspiciously nice caption: "Check out my boy Lloyd bank$. New Mix tape coming soon! Independence Day, he is doing his own thing and you know it’s gonna be loaded with bars. (Check him out) PLK get the strap."
Lloyd Banks has yet to publicly respond to the news and there's a chance it's all a weird troll from 50. Banks hasn't released a studio album for eight years and he seemed to be playing around with the idea of retirement as recently as three months ago, so the timing of an announcement that he's "off G-Unit Records" has raised the eyebrows of some fans.
If this news is legitimate, though, it's the end of an era. Childhood friends Lloyd Banks, 50 Cent, and Tony Yayo formed G-Unit nearly twenty years ago and they saw early success when their debut studio album Beg for Mercy went double platinum. As the years went on, tensions built between members of the group and in a 2014 interview with MTV, 50 explained that he initially started drifting away from Banks after his father died and he became musically uninspired: "Alright, he passed away, but you can't just go home and stay home."
Now seems as good of a time as ever to relive the G-Unit golden era and revisit "Hands Up" below.
