On Wednesday, J. Cole shared an extended interview with Angie Martinez on his YouTube account. The hour-and-a-half long talk was filmed in Miami at Salaam Remi's house before Cole's performance at Rolling Loud.
Cole confirmed that he is kiLL Edward, the only featured artist on his new album KOD. He began writing under the alias after "the name [J. Cole] started to feel like a box... I was like 'Yo, I don't wanna talk about myself no more." The name "Edward" is the first name of Cole's step father, with "kiLL Edward" representing Cole's desire "to kill the shit that I inherited from him. There's aspects of myself... shit that I want to overcome and beat, that I got from him." Cole is working on a full-length kiLL Edward album, which he says sounds like "the future."
However, there's another highly anticipated project that unfortunately does not exist: the long-rumored J. Cole/Kendrick Lamar album. Cole squashed Ab-Soul's apparent confirmation of the project, and also said that there are no plans to make it happen anytime soon. "[Ab-Soul] might be talking about when we originally got to work. This was years ago... we just did a few songs, a bunch of ideas, put it like that. You wouldn't call it an album, nothing like that."
Cole also expressed displeasure at Kanye West for tweeting an screenshot of his phone as the two spoke (the tweet has since been deleted). "That made me feel a certain type of way, and I told him that." The call came after it emerged that Kanye believes Cole disses him on record frequently, and as West went on a tear of social media support for "free thinking" and the far right. "He apologized, for the record... but then I told him it felt like you just used my name and that very quick conversation for social media and to keep your thing going."
As for his next album The Fall Off, Cole says it "probably won't come for another year."
