With The Fall Off arriving Friday, J. Cole has shared the album’s back cover, revealing the track lists for both sides of the double disc. As he’s done with each reveal tied to the project, he also provided some context, describing the album as a full-circle moment connected to his very first release, The Come Up.
“Some of the very first verses for The Come Up were written when I was just 19 years old,” he wrote on his socials. “The title of that project—the first one I would ever release—had a double meaning. There was the obvious one: my ambitions to ‘come up’ in the rap game.”
The second had to do with his decision to leave Fayetteville, North Carolina, and “‘come up’ to New York City on a dream-chasing mission.”
As Cole notes, The Come Up finds him “telling the world how he’s going to make it and proudly put his unknown city on the map,” complete with skits of phone calls home to his mother and friends ahead of holiday breaks.
Disc 29 tells the story of his return to Fayetteville at age 29, when he was “at a crossroads with the three loves of my life: my woman, my craft, and my city.”
Disc 39 is about his trip to the city at age 39, when he was “older and a little closer to peace.”
The back cover features a photo of Cole’s bedroom walls when he was 15 years old. That image and all other photos included on that version of the album were taken by Cole.
Cole also took a moment to thank “every artist and photographer that cleared these pictures.”
“When this album releases,” he added, “please know that you…are in the music too.”
Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.