J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival ending in 2025: “What a ride it’s been”
J. Cole‘s Dreamville Festival is officially ending in 2025, set to take place on April 5 and 6 at Raleigh, North Carolina’s Dorothea Dix Park.
- READ MORE: J. Cole’s 10 best songs – ever!
The festival made its announcement last night (December 10). “What a ride it’s been… We can’t thank y’all enough for all the memories we’ve shared,” they wrote in a press statement.
“From the very beginning, the idea behind the fest was creating a place where our fans, the Dreamville community, could spend time together, a place where they could see themselves reflected, a place to share in experiences. Let’s run it back one more time in April!”
The Dreamville 2025 lineup will be announced early next year – it will also be the festival’s fifth anniversary. Presale tickets will be released later today at 2pm UK time, or 9am EST, on the festival’s official website here.
The North Carolina-raised rapper first announced his own music festival back in 2018, but its inaugural edition wasn’t held until April 2019 after the previous year’s event was cancelled due to Hurricane Florence. This year’s line-up was led by J. Cole, SZA, Chris Brown, and Nicki Minaj.
Earlier this year, J. Cole released surprise album ‘Might Delete Later’, which featured a line that responded to the Kendrick Lamar-featured track ‘Like That’.
The brief back and forth resulted in an apology from J. Cole, but it would only pick up steam once Drake entered the picture. Read the full timeline of how the feud between Lamar and Drake played out this year.
‘Not Like Us’, the Lamar track that capped off the beef, was ranked as number two in NME‘s 50 best songs of 2024. Fred Garratt-Stanley wrote: “This year, Kendrick Lamar and Drake changed what we thought we knew about rap beef. ‘Not Like Us’ packaged intelligent, intensely researched character assassinations into a fierce, booming DJ Mustard-produced club hit.”
“Though his savage, accusatory wordplay grabbed the headlines, it was Lamar’s dissection of Drake as “coloniser” that truly underlined his pure vitriol.”
“Lamar’s surprise album ‘GNX’ (and Mustard co-production ‘TV Off’) rubber-stamped his all-conquering status in November, but for many the battle was won months ago. Lamar set out to destroy Drake; with ‘Not Like Us’, he came out unquestionably top dog.”
In other news, J. Cole has been busy reappraising his back catalog – after recent activity that included reissuing past mixtapes and teasing old, previously-unreleased tracks, the rapper announced a ‘Forest Hills Drive’ anniversary show for New York’s Madison Square Garden this month.
The post J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival ending in 2025: “What a ride it’s been” appeared first on NME.
Daniel Peters
NME
