Just weeks before he was shot and killed in Florida, XXXTentacion signed a record deal worth $10 million, the New York Times reports. According to the Times, X was offered the contract by Empire, the same label he released his debut album 17 on last year.
According to multiple people who were “briefed on the terms,” Empire planned on releasing the Florida rapper’s third album sometime this year, and he had been in the studio working on new music at the time of his death.
Empire founder Ghazi Shami confirmed that the rapper had finished “a significant amount of material” for the album before he died. XXXTentacion’s posthumous third album isn’t expected to drop until at least October due to a clause in his last record contract with a distribution unit of Universal Music Group.
The release of his third album will no doubt contribute to the controversial rapper’s posthumous rise in popularity. The week after his death, his latest single “Sad!” jumped from No. 52 to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and he beat Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s Everything Is Love joint album for the #1 spot for that week.
The video for “Sad!”—which was released the day of his private funeral and eerily shows him attending his own funeral and fighting with his own resurrected body—has been viewed more than 60 million times on YouTube, bringing his total audio and video streams for his music to a whopping 4.6 billion, according to Nielson.
