Kids See Ghosts came out on June 8, 2018, the third of five seven-song albums Kanye West produced in Wyoming that summer and a week after his own Ye. It is the only album by Kids See Ghosts, his duo with Kid Cudi, and it runs 23 minutes. The two had worked together since Cudi helped write 808s & Heartbreak in 2008, and both came to this record from a hard stretch: Cudi had checked himself into rehab for depression and suicidal urges in October 2016, and West had just written his bipolar diagnosis on the cover of Ye.
By Cudi’s account, the work began at West’s house in December 2016 with beats and freestyles, and moved to Japan and China in the summer of 2017. He told Complex he took the joint album for a passing idea until West kept calling him over and said he wanted to make a spiritual record. In Wyoming, he told Billboard, they already had “Reborn” and “4th Dimension” and took their time fine-tuning; the whole thing took a little over a year and a half. Both men produced. Mike Dean mixed it and worked on four songs, Dot da Genius, Cudi’s partner in WZRD, on “Reborn” and “Cudi Montage”, Plain Pat on four and André 3000 on “Fire”. Takashi Murakami, who painted the Graduation cover, made the sleeve from his own painting Manji-Fuji.
The samples do a lot of the work. “Fire” takes its drums from Napoleon XIV’s 1966 novelty single “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”. “4th Dimension” runs on Louis Prima’s 1936 “What Will Santa Claus Say? (When He Finds Everybody Swingin’)”, and Prima, who died in 1978, is credited as a featured artist, a credit the attorney for his foundation told Complex was agreed hours before release. The track ends on a spoken clip of the gospel singer Shirley Ann Lee, which Rolling Stone heard as advice to keep a song to about three minutes. “Feel the Love” opens with a Pusha T verse, Cudi’s hook and West imitating gunfire with his voice.
“Freeee (Ghost Town, Pt. 2)” picks up a song from Ye, with Ty Dolla $ign on vocals and Jeff Bhasker, the main producer of 808s & Heartbreak, as co-producer. Pitchfork described its buzzing cello and distorted drums. “Reborn”, the longest track at 5:24, is about pushing past depression, and the A.V. Club was struck by how gently Cudi treats himself on it. The title track features Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def. “Cudi Montage” is built on “Burn the Rain”, a Kurt Cobain home recording from the 2015 documentary Montage of Heck, and West’s verse runs from a cycle of violence and loss to Alice Johnson, freed that week after Kim Kardashian lobbied for her. The rollout was rough: the bonfire listening party in Santa Clarita, California, ran late, and several songs reached streaming services mislabeled. It still opened at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 142,000 units, and all seven tracks entered the Hot 100, “Reborn” highest at No. 39.
Critics agreed it was a clear step up from Ye. The Guardian, which in the same review called Ye the worst record in West’s catalogue, heard a return to form, and Pitchfork called these the most intriguing songs of the Wyoming run so far. They split over whose album it is. The A.V. Club called Cudi “the spiritual and artistic backbone” and NME called it “Cudi’s album through and through”, while Rolling Stone, at three stars, found him mostly drowned out by West and the whole thing short of their best work. Pitchfork also noted how unfinished much of it sounds. The album arrived weeks after West told TMZ that slavery “sounds like a choice”, and several reviews weighed the music against that.
This is a joint album in the full sense, and it works in the two directions critics described. West is pulled into Cudi’s slower, more inward lane, and Cudi gets West’s ear for a sample, the one that turned a 1936 Christmas swing record into “4th Dimension”. At seven songs nothing is padding, and the rough edges Pitchfork worried about suit a record this short; the Shirley Ann Lee clip could be its brief. The duo did not last: Cudi ended it in April 2022, and no second album followed. In July 2026 he said they were rebuilding their friendship, and on September 4 he joined West at Soldier Field in Chicago for “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1” and “Ghost Town”.
