Will Smith is to release his first album in 20 years later this month, as the actor continues to rebuild his career following his assault on Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards.
Writing on Instagram, he said the album Based on a True Story would be released on 28 March, adding: “Been working on this project for a minute and I’m itchin’ to get it out to y’all”.
He also shared the tracklist, featuring guest spots from Teyana Taylor, his son Jaden, his longtime musical foil Jazzy Jeff, and more.
Smith has released a handful of singles from the project already, including Beautiful Scars (featuring Big Sean and OBanga), Tantrum (featuring Joyner Lucas), Work of Art (featuring Jaden and Russ) and You Can Make It, a gospel-influenced track which he performed at the BET awards in June 2024.
Smith has kept a fairly low profile following the Rock incident, in which he slapped the Oscars host and verbally abused him. The incident caused him to be banned from the Academy Awards for 10 years, and Netflix reportedly paused development of Fast and Loose, a film he was set to star in.
A film released later in 2022, Emancipation, performed poorly, and Smith – once one of Hollywood’s definitive leading men who won a best actor Oscar for King Richard – spent time away from acting. He returned in 2024 with the fourth instalment of the Bad Boys franchise, Ride or Die, which was a commercial success, earning over $400m, considerably more than its $100m budget.
The film made reference to Smith’s slapping of Rock, and Smith addresses the Oscars incident on the song Beautiful Scars, rapping: “I hate when I lose it, but I face the music / ‘Oh, why did he do it?’ See, I’m only human”.
In an interview about the song with the lyrics database Genius, he said: “I hate admitting that I’m only human – my ego wants to be Superman … The word I was thinking about when I thought about the last couple of years of my life was ‘brutaful’ – brutal and beautiful.”
In the interview and on the song, he compares his attitude to kintsugi, the Japanese art of piecing smashed pottery back together, telling Genius: “I can look at [the Oscars incident] as an absolute mess, horrible, terrible – or I can look at it as a really great kintsugi opportunity, to rebuild something beautiful and powerful.”
He added that he wanted the album to set a new bar for his musical artistry, saying: “I’m a master actor but I’ve never given myself the opportunity to elevate my poetry, my concepts, to the level of the mastery I’ve attained as an actor.”
Smith may not feel his hip-hop and pop music matches up with his acting, but it was certainly commercially successful.
He topped the UK charts with Boom! Shake the Room as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and the duo had another global hit with Summertime, before Smith went solo under his own name for the theme song to his film Men in Black. That was another UK chart-topper, and the first of 10 UK Top 10 singles; his tracks Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It and Wild Wild West topped the US singles chart. But following 2005 album Lost and Found, he has released little new music.
