Cadence Weapon Readies 'Existential Rap Album,' 'Roquentin'

Edmonton rapper Cadence Weapon, aka Roland Pemberton, has a new record coming out in the spring, but don't expect it to be like his recent release, 'Tron Legacy: The Mixtape.'

"I've been working on it for a long time, and it's a completely different sound for me," Pemberton tells Spinner. "It doesn't sound very much like the mixtape at all. It's all live instruments; the entire album has no samples."

The album may have started off as a bunch of beats Pemberton created on his own, but the original version isn't what you'll hear when you pick it up next year.

"I presented [the first version] to the band that I developed in Toronto, and then I spent six months jamming with them until we had replaced all the parts that I wrote with more robust ideas," he says of 'Roquentin.' "Conceptually, it's an existential rap album; it's very focused on life and death. I feel like it's the best thing I've done."

Watch Cadence Weapon Perform 'Bad Graffiti' off 'Tron Legacy: The Mixtape'
But one thing that is similar to his mixtape is the appearance of fellow rapper Buck 65 on the record. The two wrote a song about a hit-making machine a friend of Pemberton's once saw at a trade show.

"Basically, you put your song into the machine and they give it a score out of 100 based on its catchiness and finality and things. Nowadays, they say if they put a single through the machine and it gets under 90, it's not a 'single' -- Whitney Houston will get 100 percent on this," says Pemberton. "So me and Buck wrote this song from the different perspectives of somebody who's using the machine and somebody who's trying to get there. It's called 'You Can't Stop the Machine.'"

With all of his recent projects and releases, Pemberton, himself, seems to be a machine that can't be stopped.