Lupe Fiasco returned with his Drill Music in Zion studio LP on June 24. The Chicago-bred emcee presented the 10-track project through 1st & 15th Too and Thirty Tigers.
Drill Music in Zion garnered general praise from professional reviewers. According to Lupe Fiasco, he recorded his eighth full-length album in less than a week.
Fiasco stopped by SiriusXM to promote his latest body of work. The conversation featured the 40-year-old rapper explaining the meaning behind the album’s title. He also spoke about how his sister, Ayesha Jaco, played a role in naming the LP.
“The best definition of the title was actually from my sister,” said Lupe. “My sister does the opening record on the album, Ayesha Jaco. She did the opening for Food & Liquor and The Cool, my first two albums.”
The “Superstar” hitmaker added, “I did this record in three days, so I didn’t have that much time to really express what this title was… But I gave it to [Ayesha] to kind of like [say], ‘Here’s the title. What is that? How are you responding to that?'”
The Matrix Movies Inspired Lupe Fiasco’s Latest LP
Lupe Fiasco also spoke about the Matrix movie franchise inspiring Drill Music In Zion‘s name. In the Wachowskis-directed films, the characters who escaped the computer-generated reality of The Matrix live in an underground city called Zion.
“That place is a sanctuary away from all the agents and other stuff,” explained Lupe Fiasco about Zion in The Matrix. “But there’s a scene in there, and the whole arc of the movie, where the robots have found a way to drill down into Zion. So they finally found it and started to drill.”
Fiasco continued, “Maybe it’s Matrix 2. There’s a scene where they’re just standing in Zion and it’s all quiet then all of a sudden you see pieces of the ceiling start to fall and it’s this whole epic scene. So that one scene in the film became the inspiration for the joint.”
The original Matrix motion picture from 1999 is widely considered a sci-fi classic. The Matrix Reloaded arrived in 2003. The Matrix Revolutions hit theaters later that year. Warner Bros. Pictures then revived the franchise with The Matrix Resurrections in 2021.