UPDATED: Summer officially started a few weeks back, but Donald Glover a.k.a. Childish Gambino has decided July 11 is the day to celebrate it, dropping two new summer-themed songs on Wednesday morning. “Summertime Magic” and “Feels Like Summer” arrived without any advance notice on streaming services under the title “Summer Pack.”
Glover has now dropped a total of four new songs since announcing his new deal with RCA Records back in January: During his hosting appearance on “Saturday Night Live” In May, he debuted a new song called “Saturday” — which is similar in feel to the summer songs — as well as his hard-hitting “This Is America,” for which a politically charged video directed by Hiro Murai was released at the same time.
In a press release announcing the songs issued an hour after they dropped, “Summertime Magic” was billed as “the first official single from Gambino’s forthcoming debut album” through RCA. While no release date has been announced, it seems likely that it will by the time of Gambino’s North American tour with guests Rae Sremmurd and Vince Staples, which launches Sept. 6 in Atlanta. Glover has also wiped his Twitter account at some point in recent days — which usually means a celebrity is clearing the decks for a major new project — adding an announcement of the new songs on Wednesday morning.
Glover, who performed a riveting version of “Terrified” at the Grammy Awards in January, said that he plans to retire the Childish Gambino name after his next album. His new label deal was announced during Grammy week: The initial announcement said that new music was coming later this year, and although a rep quickly revised that statement to be less specific, Glover promised he will perform new music at the next installment of his “Pharos” festival, which he premiered in Joshua Tree, California in 2016; those performances were recorded and released on the vinyl edition of his latest album “Awaken, My Love!,” which garnered three Grammy nominations and won one.
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