Ye Surprise Drops ‘Bully’ Album Via Short Wrestling Film Starring Son Saint West

The short was directed by the rapper and edited by Hype Williams.

Mar 19, 2025 - 14:58

Ye Surprise Drops ‘Bully’ Album Via Short Wrestling Film Starring Son Saint West

After months of teases, Ye surprise released his Bully album on Tuesday night (March 18) in three different versions. Though at press time only one of those versions appeared to be live, the short film that is available was directed by West and edited by famed hip-hop video master Hype Williams and stars the rapper’s son, Saint West, in a series of bizarre grappling-themed visuals.

The black and white film opens with Saint banging a toy hammer on the head of a professional Japanese wrestler as his dad raps, “Nobody finna to extort me/ Even when they record me/ I’mma keep it more g/ Hand me a drink before I get more deep.” The song harkens back to classic West compositions, with the MC rapping over a loop of Kden Drip’s “Preacher Man.”

While Ye hyped the “screening version,” the post Hype version” and the “post post Hype version,” at press time it appeared that only the first iteration was available to screen using the free software Frame.io.

The visual continues with Saint swinging his plastic hammer at a series of other wrestlers, laying them out as his dad croons over the album’s spare, soul-flecked compositions, including a glitchy lament in which West interpolates the Carpenters’ “(They Long To Be) Close To You,” crooning the song’s lyrics through AutoTune. On the next untitled song West sings in Spanish over a mariachi-like backing track, followed by a song that interpolates the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

The sound of the album harkens back to West’s most experimental, creatively lauded period in the early 2000s, when he released 808s & Heartbreak (2008) and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) back-to-back.

West first teased Bully in September 2024 during a show in China where he premiered the song “Beauty and the Beast.” At press time there were no credits available for the album and it did not appear to be available on any of the major music streaming platforms, or YouTube, with West saying on X that he was purposely avoiding that route in his latest antisemitic rant against Jewish people. “I may stop using DSPs cause streams are fake and the French and Jewish record labels treat artists like prostitutes,” he wrote, teasing that he might next release a sequel to his 2021 Donda album, Donda 2.

The surprise release came amidst yet another spree of offensive tweets from West on Tuesday, including the use of an ableist slur in which he denigrated Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s children, made claims of domestic abuse against Playboi Carti — whom he also hit with hateful homophobic slurs — as well as homophobic tweets aimed at Drake.

The album drop followed on the heels of a “Lonely Roads Still Go To Sunshine,” which Ye released on X last week, seemingly featuring vocals from imprisoned hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, as well as Ye’s daughter, North West, and Combs’ son, King Combs. The nearly five-minute song opens with what sounds like a recoded phone conversation between Ye and Diddy, who is currently incarcerated and facing multiple felony charges, including sex trafficking, racketeering, forced labor and more.

Around that same time, West posted an image of what he said was going to be the cover of his next album, an image of a red Nazi swastika against a black background, just the latest amplification by the rapper of the antisemitic tropes and images that have flooded his X account over the past few months.