Brent Faiyaz Scrapped His Album the Night Before Release. The Version We Got Is Better.

Brent Faiyaz had Icon finished last September. The tracklist was public, the singles were out, the rollout was in motion. Then, the night before it was supposed to drop, he sent a group text to his team and killed it.

That story, confirmed by his label ISO Supremacy to Rated R&B, tells you everything about what kind of record Icon turned out to be. Released today, February 13, 2026, the album is ten tracks, 33 minutes, no features, and executive produced by Raphael Saadiq. The two lead singles from the original version, "Tony Soprano" and "Peter Pan," are gone. Whatever Icon was supposed to be in September, this is something else entirely.

What got scrapped and why it matters

The original Icon was announced on July 3, 2025, when Faiyaz wiped his Instagram and posted artwork with a September 19 release date. The next day, he dropped "Tony Soprano" and "Peter Pan" as a two-pack. Both charted in New Zealand. Both signaled a confident, outward-facing album. Then the Halle Bailey and DDG controversy hit in May 2025, with allegations that Faiyaz had been involved with Bailey. Whatever effect that had on the creative process, the album that existed in September no longer exists.

In a Rolling Stone interview, Faiyaz framed the pivot around artistic range: "Everything I'm creating right now is about showing a range of concepts, principles, emotions, and experiences. Innocence versus Indecency. Vulnerability versus guardedness." That sounds like PR language until you actually listen to the record, where those tensions play out in real time across every track.

The production team reads like a genre-bending thesis

Saadiq as executive producer is the biggest signal of intent. The man behind D'Angelo's Voodoo and Solange's A Seat at the Table doesn't do empty calories. Alongside him, Chad Hugo of the Neptunes handles production on "World Is Yours" and "Four Seasons," Benny Blanco co-produces "Butterflies" and "Other Side," and Tommy Richman contributes to "Have To." Dpat, Faiyaz's longtime collaborator from their Sonder days, appears on seven of ten tracks.

Mike Dean mastered the album. That combination of names, from neo-soul to pop to hip-hop production royalty, creates something hard to pin down genre-wise, which seems to be exactly the point.

Ten tracks, no padding

At 33 minutes, Icon does something unusual for modern R&B albums: it ends. There are no skits, no interludes, no bonus tracks. "White Noise" opens the record, "Vanilla Sky" closes it at just 2:23, and the whole thing moves quickly enough that individual songs bleed together on first listen.

"Have To," the only single that survived from the original rollout, dropped on Halloween 2025 and peaked at number 37 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Its music video contained the first public acknowledgment that the September album had been shelved. The song itself is one of the more direct moments on the record, built around a Tommy Richman and Dpat production that feels more spacious than most of what surrounds it.

"Wrong Faces" and "Butterflies" sit in the album's first half and establish the emotional logic of the project. Faiyaz sings about being the solution to someone else's loneliness on the former, then pivots to prescribing self-care routines for a woman he calls "Superwoman" on the latter. There's a line between devotion and control that the album keeps walking right up to without ever fully acknowledging which side it lands on.

The quiet part

"Strangers" is where Icon gets uncomfortable in a way the rest of the album only hints at. Faiyaz tallies what he gave versus what he received, refuses to explain what went wrong, and then closes the track with a spoken-word list of self-improvement goals. Be truthful. Eat healthy. Read books. Give without expecting anything. It reads like a therapy homework assignment recited to an empty room.

"World Is Yours" offers total devotion and simultaneously rehearses for the loss. "Pure Fantasy" braids religious and romantic language until the two become indistinguishable. These aren't love songs in any traditional sense. They're negotiations.

The independence angle

All of this is happening on ISO Supremacy, Faiyaz's own label, distributed through UnitedMasters. He's not on a major. He scrapped a finished album and rebuilt it without anyone's permission, without a label executive telling him the rollout was too expensive to restart. In an industry where release dates are usually contractual obligations, pulling the plug the night before is either reckless or the kind of creative freedom most artists only talk about having.

Faiyaz wrote every track on Icon. All ten songs are credited solely to Christopher Wood, his birth name. For a 33-minute album with production from some of the most in-demand names in music, that's a level of singular authorship that's getting rarer every year.

Where this fits

Wasteland, his 2022 album, was a sprawling 19-track project that established Faiyaz as an artist comfortable with dark, moody R&B. Larger than Life, the 2023 mixtape, peaked at number 11 on the Billboard 200. Icon is smaller in every measurable way, shorter, fewer songs, no features, and yet it sounds like he actually knew what he wanted this time. Scrapping your album and starting over is a gamble. Doing it without a major label safety net, with Raphael Saadiq steering the ship and Mike Dean on the final master, is a bet on craft over content volume.

Whether the bet pays off commercially remains to be seen. The album just dropped today. But the story of how it got here, the scrapped version, the Halloween single, the featureless tracklist, already makes it one of the more interesting release narratives of 2026 so far.