The Native Tongues trio plans a very special Valentine’s Day gift.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of their classic 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul will make their entire discography available for free download for 25 hours, from Friday, February 14th at 11am EST until Saturday at noon.
Update: And here it is.
Update 2: As Matthew McVickar points out on Tumblr, fans could have just gone straight to torrent sites rather than dealing with De La Soul’s website-email two-step: it appears that’s exactly what the group’s camp did. While the files are 320kbps, the comment fields point to different sources, so it’s unclear if these are transcodes.
“It’s about allowing our fans who have been looking and trying to get a hold of our music to have access to it,” De La Soul’s Posdnuous tells Rolling Stone. “Its been too long where our fans haven’t had access to everything. This is our way of showing them how much we love them.”
After the music giveaway, they’ll continue to release new songs in the run-up to You’re Welcome, the long-delayed follow-up to 2004’s The Grind Date, which they hope to release before summer. In addition, they’ll release Preemium Soul on the Rocks, an EP split featuring beats by DJ Premier and Pete Rock.
“We have tons of music, but we’re our own worst critics,” Posdnuous says of the delayed releases. “Certain groups have too many ‘yes men.’ In our group, we have too many ‘no men.’ When we look back on some of the stuff we have, we’re like, ‘Yo, we need to just put this out.'”
And they’re not done: “We also have this whole other album that we’re working on that… Wooo, I wish I could talk about it,” he teases.