Hip-Hop Legend Returns With First Album in 9 Years: Comeback Set for MC Lyte

MC Lyte is showing she’s still got it. The Brooklyn-born rap pioneer has announced she has an album coming this summer. It marks the first since 2015. “I got a new record,” she told MC Sha-Rock and Grandmaster Caz during her Friday (May 10) appearance on their Rock The Bells show That’s The Joint, as reported by VIBE. 

She continued, “I’m working on it right now. The new single is out. It’s ‘Woman.’ The new record is coming. We’ll have another single coming in June for Black Music Month, which is going to be spectacular. Of course, I’ve got some winning folks on this album, now I gotta talk to Major. The album comes out Aug. 9 and the next single comes out June 9.”

Her last project was the 2015 LP Legend. Her most recent single, “Woman” featuring Big Daddy Kane, Raheem DeVaughn, and Cheryl “Salt” James, was released in March.

Lyte has been focused on acting and hosting, doing voiceover work, and beyond. In an interview with Blavity, she explained diversifying her work outside of rapping and realizing she needed to do so early on in her career and order to have sustainability.

“It was very early on in my career. My first manager said to me one day that it was a duty to raise the awareness of my celebrity without a hit record,” she said.

She added: “And so we began at that point to concentrate on how to make that happen. But more specifically, I began to really hone in on all of the other things that I wanted to do. So I went to acting class and voiceover coaching and things of that nature because I knew that would be next up in the line for what it was that I wanted to do. And I didn’t want to be asked to be involved in something and invited and not be able to deliver. So it was the preparation, and I think that must have happened probably in my early 20s.”