Way back in 2011, the Detroit rap great Danny Brown released XXX, the free-download album that introduced him to large parts of the world. Brown had been a presence on the Detroit underground for years before XXX, and he’d already developed an online cult, but XXX was the album that got Brown onto the festival circuit and made him a celebrity. The title was a sort of triple entendre: For sex, for drugs, and for Brown’s age. When Danny Brown had his big breakout moment, he was 30 years old. In a few months, Brown will turn 40, and it looks like he might commemorate the occasion with a sequel to XXX.

On Twitter last night, Brown posted a 30-second audio clip with the caption XXXX, which was enough to get people talking. Brown’s last album was 2019’s excellent uknowhatimsayin¿, recorded with executive producer Q-Tip. In 2020, Brown has been relatively quiet, despite collaborations with producers Jimmy Edgar and Black Noi$e and incarcerated LA rap king Drakeo The Ruler. It feels good to think about the man holing up and marking a life milestone with a whole new album.

A 30-second Twitter audio clip is not much to go on, but it’s a good 30 seconds. In that clip, Brown raps over a strange, nearly drumless loop made up of synth-plinks and acoustic-guitar strums. In Brown’s replies, someone identified that beat: “Circuitloop,” an instrumental that the LA producer and NxWorries member Knxwledge released earlier this year. On that track, Brown sounds relatively quiet but fully dialed-in, and he namechecks Kenny Lattimore, Macklemore, and Ray Allen’s He Got Game character Jesus Shuttlesworth. Listen below.

XXXX pic.twitter.com/YhzOEluySb

— Danny Brown (@xdannyxbrownx) October 22, 2020

Brown turns 40 in March. XXX came out in August of 2011. It would be cool if we got a new Danny Brown album before August of 2021, but I’ll take what I can get.