Last week it was announced that The Roots would be releasing their lucky 13th album, Undun, in December via Def Jam. Little was revealed about the record other than that it would be a “concept album.” Now, bandleader ?uestlove has revealed the topic of the record, the life of Redford Stevens, a man who died at the age of 25 in 1999. According to Questo:

“At this point in our career we’d like for our work to have a unifying theme, and an experiential quality,” says Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, 40. “We’ve been intentionally making our albums shorter in length so that they can be experienced as a continuous work. The music is band-oriented with an eye on the moody cinematic. As a DJ, I am the King of playlists, but I don’t want our albums to feel like a playlist or a mixtape for that matter. We want to tell stories that work within the album format and we want the stories to be nuanced and useful to people. undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn’t born criminal. He’s not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner like Tupac’s character Bishop in Juice… he’s actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment… At the end of the day… isn’t that what we all do?”

The group also announced that the first single from Undun will be “Make My,” which features Big K.R.I.T. The single drops Nov. 1. Check the full tracklist for Undun after the jump.

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