The sophomore slump is real and it has caused many musicians to stumble. But Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar doesn’t seem too concerned about how his forthcoming effort will stack up against his critically applauded major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city. During a recent interview with Hot 97’s Ebro, he compared the two works and called his second LP “even more raw.”

“It’s a little more dirty with the live, dirty drums on it,” Lamar said. “It’s not something that’s contemporary with the MPC and you pressing different patterns and things like that, but we’ll see how it come out. Everything’s really in-house. Of course Dre, but I really stick with four producers that I’ve been working with since day one. I don’t really go outside the box of that soundwave.”

The project draws from music that inspired Lamar growing up, and will attempt to defy categorization. “It’s really been a process about me grabbing from these different types of inspirations that I been growing up off of and putting it into my own batch of Hip-Hop,” he said. “I think from jump, the classification of music is totally twisted, because now we have a generation where you take an Isley Brothers sample, which is soul, and now we’re in a world where people would consider it pop.”

The lead single “i” hasn’t exactly received a warm reception from fans. But the TDE rapper recently revealed that he wrote it while depressed and feeling pressure from his recent rise to fame. “The record feels great and feels good, but it comes from a place of depression. It comes from a place of insecurity. Not only from them, but from myself,” Lamar said. He also told Power 106’s Jeff G. that he was focused solely on staying true to himself as an artist. “I’m gonna go in the studio and I’m going to do what I feel organically without being confined to industry standards or what people assume that I should do, because at the end of the day, man, I’m an artist and I would hate to be stagnant.”