Alternative Hip-Hop veterans The Roots gear up for the December 6th, 2011 release of their thirteenth overall recording and first concept album Undun. A ton of press regarding the release has been circulating over at Okayplayer, and we have an explanation of what the record is about and how The Roots have taken hold of their career and changed it to better suit an overall thematic experience for the listener.

?uestlove states, “At this point in our career we’d like for our work to have a unifying theme, and an experiential quality. We’ve been intentionally making our albums shorter in length so that they can be experienced as a continuous work. The music is band-oriented with an eye on the moody cinematic. As a DJ, I am the King of playlists, but I don’t want our albums to feel like a playlist or a mixtape for that matter. We want to tell stories that work within the album format and we want the stories to be nuanced and useful to people. Undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn’t born criminal. He’s not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner like Tupac’s character Bishop in Juice… he’s actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment… At the end of the day… isn’t that what we all do?”

With the release of two out of the four videos slated for release by the band, we get a full taste of what’s in store for us when the ten track disc drops and if it’s anything like what we hear on the debut single “Make My” featuring Big K.R.I.T., 2020k is fully ready for Undun as it sounds like a conceptual advancement from the gorgeously mature 2010 release How I Got Over.