Quick Verdict DAMN. arrived on April 14, 2017, two years after To Pimp a Butterfly had set an almost impossibly high bar, and Kendrick Lamar cleared it on different terms entirely. Where TPAB was sprawling, jazz-inflected, and consciously avant-garde, DAMN. is compact, trap-influenced, and deliberately accessible — a 55-minute album of 14 tracks that manages to be simultaneously his most commercially successful and most emotionally complex record. It debuted at number one o