Kendrick Lamar Albums in Order: How Each of the Six Is Built, From Section.80 to GNX

Kendrick Lamar albums in order, straight up: Section.80 (2011), good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), DAMN. (2017), Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (2022) and GNX (2024). That’s six studio albums in thirteen years, and every one runs on a different machine. One is billed as a short film. One is a poem read to a dead man. One is a tracklist built to play backwards. One is a therapy session, and the last is a West Coast homecoming.

Here’s the receipt that should lead every Kendrick conversation and somehow never does. All five studio albums from GKMC to GNX were nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys, and none of them won. He’s the most-awarded rapper in Grammy history, with 27 trophies after the February 2026 ceremony, passing Jay-Z’s 25. The big one still isn’t on the shelf.

Below: the quick list, the tapes that came before it, how each album is built, the in-between projects (untitled unmastered. and Black Panther), and a real answer to where you should start.

Kendrick Lamar Albums in Order: The Quick List

Every Kendrick Lamar album with its US release date, label and Billboard 200 debut. Certifications come from the live RIAA database, not fan wikis, because Kendrick’s certs get inflated online constantly.

1. Section.80: July 2, 2011 (Top Dawg Entertainment). Peaked at No. 113, Platinum in January 2026. The device: a generation portrait, with recurring characters.
2. good kid, m.A.A.d city: October 22, 2012 (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope). Debuted at No. 2, 3x Platinum. The device: “a short film by Kendrick Lamar,” printed right on the cover.
3. To Pimp a Butterfly: March 15, 2015 (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope). Debuted at No. 1, Platinum. The device: a poem that grows across the album and gets read in full to Tupac.
4. DAMN.: April 14, 2017 (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope). Debuted at No. 1, 3x Platinum. The device: a tracklist that tells a story forwards and backwards.
5. Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers: May 13, 2022 (pgLang/TDE/Aftermath/Interscope). Debuted at No. 1. The device: a double album structured as therapy.
6. GNX: November 22, 2024 (pgLang/Interscope). Debuted at No. 1. The device: a surprise-drop West Coast reclaim.

What doesn’t count as a studio album

Two projects sit between the six and confuse every “how many albums” count. untitled unmastered. (March 4, 2016) is a compilation of demos from the To Pimp a Butterfly sessions. Black Panther: The Album (February 9, 2018) is a film soundtrack Kendrick curated and executive produced with Top Dawg. Both went No. 1, and both are essential, but neither is a studio album. Add the 2009 EP and five mixtapes and the full count is 6 studio albums, 1 compilation, 1 soundtrack, 1 EP and 5 tapes.

Before the Albums: K.Dot, the Tapes and Overly Dedicated

Before Kendrick Lamar there was K.Dot, a Compton teenager rapping on whatever TDE could put in front of him. Most “albums in order” lists skip this stretch, but you can’t hear Section.80 properly without it.

The K.Dot tapes

Y.H.N.I.C. (Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year) came out in the mid-2000s while he was still in high school. Nobody, including Wikipedia, can pin the exact year, and the sources split between 2003 and 2005. Training Day followed in 2007, then No Sleep ‘Til NYC with labelmate Jay Rock in December 2007. C4 (January 30, 2009) was a homage to Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, and it’s the tape where you can hear him trying on another man’s voice. Rolling Stone’s later mixtape primer wasn’t kind to it. It’s the sound of a rapper who hadn’t found himself yet.

Dropping the name

The turn came on December 31, 2009. He released the free Kendrick Lamar EP on DatPiff, his first project under his government name. K.Dot was retired on New Year’s Eve, and that’s when the introspective, character-driven writer showed up.

Overly Dedicated, the first chart entry

Overly Dedicated hit digital stores on September 14, 2010 and became a free download nine days later. It’s often quoted as a No. 72 Billboard 200 album. It wasn’t. The No. 72 peak was on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums (plus No. 46 on Heatseekers). Still, it was his first Billboard chart entry of any kind, and it carried “Ignorance Is Bliss,” the song whose YouTube video reportedly made Dr. Dre want to work with him.

Section.80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city: The Short Film

Section.80 (2011): 5,000 copies and a slow-burn Platinum

Section.80 dropped July 2, 2011 as a digital-only TDE release. It debuted at No. 113 on the Billboard 200, with first-week sales reported at about 5,253, every one of them a download. The lead single was “HiiiPoWeR” (April 12, 2011), produced by J. Cole, and it closes the album like a mission statement. Several songs revolve around two women, Tammy and Keisha, which was a first sign of the character writing that would define everything after.

Here’s the jewel: Section.80 wasn’t certified Platinum until January 20, 2026, fourteen and a half years after release. Today’s fans went back and paid the debut’s tab.

good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012): “a short film by Kendrick Lamar”

The cover tells you how to listen. Under the title, in small print: a short film by Kendrick Lamar. GKMC follows 17-year-old Kendrick through Compton, told out of order. There’s a borrowed van, a girl named Sherane, a robbery with the homies and a shooting, and it ends in a prayer. His parents, Paula Oliver and Kenny Duckworth, appear throughout on voicemail skits. On “Real,” his dad hands the phone to his mom, who tells him to tell his story and give back to Compton. That voicemail is the thesis of his whole catalog.

The cover photo is a Polaroid of baby Kendrick on his uncle’s lap, with another uncle and his grandfather. There’s a baby bottle next to a 40-ounce, and the adults’ eyes are blacked out. Dr. Dre isn’t in that picture, despite what half the internet says. Dre’s role was behind the board. He and Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith were executive producers, and the record came out through TDE, Aftermath and Interscope. We traced Dre’s hand across his whole career in our Dr. Dre songs breakdown.

The credits worth knowing

• “Money Trees”: DJ Dahi built it on Beach House’s “Silver Soul” (from Teen Dream, 2010), slowed and flipped.
• “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”: Sounwave, TDE’s in-house architect, who shows up on every album after this.
• “good kid”: Pharrell. “Compton”: Just Blaze. “The Recipe”: Scoop DeVille.

The numbers

GKMC debuted at No. 2 with 242,000 copies. The only album ahead of it that week was Taylor Swift’s Red, which moved 1.2 million. It’s certified 3x Platinum. Then it simply refused to leave the chart. In spring 2026 it became the first hip-hop studio album to spend 700 weeks on the Billboard 200, more than thirteen years of continuous presence. At the 2014 Grammys it lost Best Rap Album to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s The Heist and Album of the Year to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. Macklemore then texted Kendrick “You got robbed” and posted the screenshot. That was the first of the five AOTY losses.

To Pimp a Butterfly and untitled unmastered.: The Poem

The poem and the Tupac conversation

GKMC was a film. To Pimp a Butterfly is a poem. It opens with “I remember you was conflicted, misusing your influence,” and Kendrick adds a few lines at a time between songs. Each fragment tees up what comes next. On the closer, the 12-minute “Mortal Man,” he reads the whole thing out loud to Tupac Shakur, and Pac answers.

That answer is real audio. The “conversation” is stitched from Mats Nileskär’s November 1994 interview with Tupac for P3 Soul on Swedish public radio. Kendrick wrote his questions around Pac’s answers two decades later. The album’s working title was Tu Pimp a Caterpillar, an acronym that spells Tu.P.A.C. The butterfly was always about him.

The LA jazz bench

Sonically, TPAB is Kendrick walking into the Los Angeles jazz and funk underground and staying there: Terrace Martin, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Robert Glasper, Sounwave, and George Clinton on the opening track. That scene has deep roots in LA’s Project Blowed workshop era, which we traced in our Freestyle Fellowship piece on the trumpet player who linked Project Blowed to Kendrick.

“King Kunta” is the album’s funk thesis. It samples Ahmad’s “We Want the Funk” (1994) and interpolates Mausberg’s “Get Nekkid,” a DJ Quik production. That’s a direct line to Compton’s own G-funk lineage, hidden inside a song named for Kunta Kinte, the runaway from Roots.

The accidental release and a Spotify record

TPAB was scheduled for March 23, 2015. It appeared on iTunes and Spotify on March 15, eight days early. Top Dawg blamed Interscope, and the album was pulled from iTunes but stayed up on Spotify. It still broke Spotify’s global first-day streaming record with 9.6 million streams, edging out Michael Bublé’s Christmas (9.5 million). It debuted at No. 1 with 324,000 units, his first chart-topper.

At the 2016 Grammys he had 11 nominations, the most ever for a rapper in a single night. He won five, including Best Rap Album, two for “Alright” (produced by Pharrell and Sounwave), and Best Music Video for his feature on Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” Album of the Year went to Swift’s 1989. That was loss number two.

untitled unmastered. (2016): the LeBron release

Kendrick performed unreleased songs from the TPAB sessions on late-night TV and at the 2016 Grammys. Fans wanted the studio versions, and so did LeBron James, who tweeted at Top Dawg that he had to release “those untitled tracks asap.” Top Dawg said he’d consider it. On March 4, 2016, untitled unmastered. arrived: eight dated, numbered demos with no titles and no rollout. It debuted at No. 1 with 178,000 units, his second straight chart-topper. If TPAB is the finished poem, untitled is the notebook it was written in.

DAMN. and Black Panther: The Tracklist That Plays Backwards

Built to run both ways

DAMN. (April 14, 2017) opens with “BLOOD.”: Kendrick stops to help a blind woman on the street, and she shoots him. Then the album rewinds. Play it front to back and it moves from wickedness toward weakness. Flip it, from “DUCKWORTH.” up to “BLOOD.”, and it tells a different story that ends with the gunshot. Kendrick said the reverse order was “premeditated” in the studio and that it “plays as a full story and even a better rhythm.” On December 8, 2017, Interscope made it official with a Collectors Edition pressing: same music, reversed tracklist, new artwork. The working title, by his own account, was “What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth.” He dropped it because it “didn’t read right.”

“DUCKWORTH.” is a true story

The closer is the best piece of storytelling Kendrick has written. Before Top Dawg ran a label, he was a young man in the streets who had already robbed one KFC and was planning another. Kendrick’s father, Ducky, worked the counter there and had been sliding him free chicken and extra biscuits. That kindness is why, as the song tells it, the second robbery never touched Ducky. Years later, Top Dawg signed Ducky’s son. 9th Wonder produced it as three beats on three samples, and he has publicly confirmed the story is real. If Kendrick hadn’t been born, the label that made him might not exist.

The numbers and the Pulitzer

DAMN. debuted at No. 1 with 603,000 units (353,000 pure sales), his biggest week ever, and “HUMBLE.” (Mike Will Made-It) became his first Hot 100 No. 1 as a lead artist. Officially it’s certified 3x Platinum by the RIAA. Early-2026 reports said it had moved enough units for far more, but the RIAA database hasn’t updated, and we only print what it shows. On April 16, 2018, DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first winner in the prize’s history that wasn’t classical or jazz. At the Grammys it won Best Rap Album and lost Album of the Year to Bruno Mars’s 24K Magic. That was loss number three.

If DAMN. is your Kendrick, the Kendrick Lamar Fan Art Hoodie is the one we’d throw on for a full forwards-then-backwards listen.

Black Panther: The Album (2018)

Ten months later Kendrick took the curator’s chair. Black Panther: The Album (February 9, 2018) was produced with Sounwave and executive produced with Top Dawg, and Kendrick’s voice runs all through it. It debuted at No. 1 with 154,000 units. “All the Stars” with SZA earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song, and the album got an Album of the Year nomination of its own. It’s not a studio album, but it’s where TDE showed it could score a blockbuster without sounding like a cash-in.

The Latest Kendrick Lamar Albums: Mr. Morale and GNX, Therapy Then the West Coast Reclaim

Mr. Morale (2022): the session

Five years passed. Then on May 8, 2022, “The Heart Part 5” arrived as a warning shot, and on May 13 came Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. It’s a double album of 18 tracks split nine and nine across two discs, built as a record of his therapy. Two narrators guide the sessions: Whitney Alford, his longtime partner, and the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. The guest list is deliberately strange: Sampha, Beth Gibbons of Portishead, Taylour Paige and Ghostface Killah, among others.

It debuted at No. 1 with about 295,000 units. It was also his last album with both TDE and Aftermath; GNX would come out on his own pgLang with Interscope. At the 2023 Grammys it won Best Rap Album and lost Album of the Year to Harry Styles’s Harry’s House. That was loss number four.

GNX (2024): the reclaim

Then came the beef. “Not Like Us” was a standalone single, and it is not on GNX, which surprises people every time. It swept five Grammys in February 2025, including Record and Song of the Year. GNX itself dropped with no warning on November 22, 2024, on pgLang and Interscope. It’s named after Buick’s GNX muscle car, and it’s built from West Coast parts: Sounwave and Jack Antonoff as core producers, Mustard on “Hey Now” and “TV Off,” and Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music” flipped on “Squabble Up.” “Luther” with SZA samples Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn’s “If This World Were Mine,” a Marvin Gaye song.

It debuted at No. 1 with 319,000 units. All 12 tracks charted on the Hot 100 and held the entire top 5 at once, which only four acts had done before him. Three months later came the Super Bowl LIX halftime show (February 9, 2025): 133.5 million viewers, the biggest halftime audience on record. We went deep on the album itself in our GNX breakdown, on the Mustard chemistry in Mustard & Kendrick, Fully Decoded, and on how the tour re-sequenced the whole catalog in our Grand National setlist breakdown.

Loss number five

At the 68th Grammys on February 1, 2026, GNX had eight nominations and won four: Best Rap Album, Record of the Year and Best Melodic Rap Performance for “Luther,” and Best Rap Song for “TV Off.” Kendrick won a fifth trophy that night as a feature on Clipse’s “Chains & Whips,” which took his career total to 27, the most of any rapper. Album of the Year went to Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Five straight studio albums, five AOTY nominations, zero wins. Counting his features on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the Black Panther soundtrack, he has seven AOTY nominations in total. For the full trophy count, see how many Grammys Kendrick Lamar has.

Where to Start With Kendrick (and the Best Listening Order)

Running the Kendrick Lamar albums in order isn’t always the best way in. Here are three paths, depending on who’s asking.

The story path: GKMC, then TPAB, then DAMN.

For a first-timer, start with good kid, m.A.A.d city. It has the clearest narrative, the most accessible beats and the strongest hooks, and it hands you the people (Mom, Dad, the homies, Compton) the rest of the catalog keeps returning to. Then To Pimp a Butterfly, which is what happens to that kid when fame and guilt hit at once. Then DAMN., the moral sum of both. That trilogy is the core of the catalog, and the rest reads better once you’ve heard it.

The chronological path

For the heads who want to watch a writer grow: Overly Dedicated, Section.80, GKMC, TPAB, untitled unmastered., DAMN., Black Panther, Mr. Morale, GNX. You’ll hear the K.Dot habits fall away, the jazz move in and the voice keep splitting into more characters, until Mr. Morale strips all of it down and GNX turns the volume back up.

The reverse-DAMN. trick

Once you know DAMN., play it from “DUCKWORTH.” back to “BLOOD.” It was built to be heard in both directions, and the second pass changes what the opening gunshot means. Then go to Mr. Morale with fresh ears. It’s the hardest Kendrick album to start with and the easiest to love once you know what came before.

If you want the merch to match the era you’re living in, our era-by-era Kendrick Lamar shirt guide covers every tour and rollout from Section.80 to the Grand National.

Kendrick Lamar Albums: Frequently Asked Questions

How many albums does Kendrick Lamar have?

Six studio albums: Section.80, good kid m.A.A.d city, To Pimp a Butterfly, DAMN., Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers and GNX. Add one compilation (untitled unmastered.), one soundtrack (Black Panther: The Album), one EP (Kendrick Lamar EP, 2009) and five mixtapes from the K.Dot era through Overly Dedicated.

What is Kendrick Lamar’s most successful album?

It depends on the measure. DAMN. had the biggest first week (603,000 units), his first Hot 100 No. 1 as a lead artist and the Pulitzer Prize. good kid, m.A.A.d city has the longest life: the first hip-hop studio album to log 700 weeks on the Billboard 200. GNX had the biggest awards night, with four Grammys including Record of the Year for “Luther.”

When did Kendrick last drop an album?

GNX, a surprise release on November 22, 2024. It turns two later this month. As of November 2026 there’s no new studio album and no official announcement. His 2026 releases have been features, including “Good Flirts” on Baby Keem’s Ca$ino and Clipse’s “Chains & Whips.”

Is untitled unmastered. a studio album?

No. It’s a compilation of demos from the To Pimp a Butterfly sessions, released March 4, 2016 after LeBron James publicly pushed Top Dawg to put it out. It went No. 1 anyway.

Has Kendrick Lamar won Album of the Year?

No. All five of his studio albums from GKMC to GNX were nominated, and they lost to Daft Punk (2014), Taylor Swift (2016), Bruno Mars (2018), Harry Styles (2023) and Bad Bunny (2026). He’s still the most-awarded rapper in Grammy history with 27 wins.

Is “Not Like Us” on GNX?

No. “Not Like Us” was a standalone single released in May 2024. GNX came six months later and never includes it, though the two are tied together in most people’s memory of that year.

Was Overly Dedicated on the Billboard 200?

No. That’s a common mix-up. Its No. 72 peak was on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and it also reached No. 46 on Heatseekers. It was still his first Billboard chart entry.

That’s the Kendrick Lamar albums catalog: six albums, six machines, one kid from Compton who keeps telling the same story from a different angle. Run it in order, then run it again your way.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team