Why We Picked This

Andrew Winistorfer, Editorial Director + Classics A&R: Despite it being a huge album at the time, Honest never came out on vinyl before. That’s what drew me to this project initially: as you can read in our Cross Talk, I think this album is incredibly underrated. Future made his big pop breakthrough album without sacrificing anything that made him a beloved internet figure. He somehow made the album with big pop songs be the same as he was before, which is such a rarity to happen; when you look at breakthrough records for somebody like Young Thug, it’s not necessarily compromised, but it’s not like the mixtapes. In this era of Future, he was doing mixtape stuff and somehow made it pop.

Honest is an album that’s unfairly underrated, retrospectively; when you go back to 2014, it’s one of the best rap albums of that year. It deserves way more attention than it currently gets, and I think that’s part of the VMP mission: to get people to reassess records that they may not have paid attention to when they came out, or have ignored in the years since they came out. We go deeper on these albums you think you know, but you maybe don’t.

And we get to do the first vinyl pressing of Honest! Who doesn’t wanna hear “Karate Chop” on their turntable, ya know?

The Packaging

It’s a black vinyl with red and white streaks; it matches the cover. The Honest logo and Future’s eyes stand out on the cover, it looks really cool. It sounds great, too; we’ve had such luck making these pressings at GZ that are quiet and can smack your speakers around like they’re in a mosh pit. “Karate Chop” was the first thing I played when I got my sample copy, and thought, “This would not have happened if we didn’t push to put this on vinyl.”