With his sixth studio album, The Off-Season, expected to debut at No. 1 on next week’s Billboard 200 albums chart, J. Cole has scored another successful single under his belt.
Billboard revealed Wednesday that Cole’s latest single, “Interlude,” has debuted at No. 8 on the Hot 100. Since its release on May 7, the song has accumulated nearly 27 million streams, which helped it climb to No. 1 on the Streaming Songs chart.
“Interlude” marks Cole’s sixth Hot 100 top 10 single, following 2017’s “Deja Vu,” 2018’s “KOD,” “ATM,” and “Kevin’s Heart,” and 2019’s “Middle Child.”
According to co-producers T-Minus and Tommy Parker, “Interlude” came together just as quickly as Cole’s decision to release it as the first single from The Off-Season.
“I think it was a couple of weeks ago,” T-Minus told Complex earlier this month, when speaking about the creation of the song. “Not a lot of songs in the music industry come out like this, because a lot of times, when a producer and artist come together, the beat can actually take three to six months for it to get in the right hands. In this situation, it was really fast.”
T-Minus went on to explain the creative process behind “Interlude.”
“Cole is very much a producer, so he likes to direct where the music is going as far as arrangement, or the bounce, or the feeling that he wants to have,” T-Minus said. “So he gave me a bunch of ideas and pointers for what he wanted to do. I kind of thought of it as me going off of the intuition for how the track would feel, and him giving his two cents on how he felt. Usually, I’m pretty great when it comes to the programming and then getting on the board and actually building up the track out of my sound collection. What people know me for, is I’m really involved in the creation and production of the track. So he had a lot of direction, I built it out, and that was it. It was a really quick process.”
