Kendrick Lamar’s Next Album Is Named After His Buick Regal GNX

You don’t have to be a Kendrick Lamar fan to vibe on his latest album, titled GNX. Car buffs will instantly recognize those three letters, which belong to one of the quickest (and coolest) cars from the 1980s. You know we’re talking about the Buick GNX.

Lamar is talking about it, too. Aside from GNX being the name of his album, track 12 also gets the call. Dare we say, there’s a bit of an old-school West Coast vibe about it, but we’ll leave such critiques for the music pros. Our attention falls to the black 1987 Buick GNX that graces the thumbnail of every album track on his YouTube channel, never mind the below teaser video.

Yes, cool cars and hip-hop are terrifically cliched, but there’s a bit more happening here. Lamar bought a pristine GNX—presumably the same one featured in the video—earlier this year. According to Complex, the car is special to the Grammy award-winning artist as it was the same kind of car his father had back in the day.

Almost the same, anyway. Baby Lamar came home from the hospital in his dad’s 1987 Buick Regal. That was the standard version of the popular 1980’s two-door luxury coupe, with the Regal T-Type and Grand National being performance variants with the infamous 3.8-liter turbocharged V-6. They were dueling with 5.0 Mustangs and IROC Camaros of the day, but the GNX was a very different beast. Compared to 245 horsepower in the 1987 Grand National, the same engine in the GNX was massaged to 276 hp. That was a conservative estimate, too, and Buick also upgraded various suspension and chassis components.

The result was one of the quickest-accelerating cars in the world for that era. It could reach 60 mph in under five seconds, a figure not far off from legends like the Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959. Only 547 were built, and if you want one today, be ready to pay well over $100,000.

We don’t know how much Lamar paid for his GNX. But we love that it’s still getting respect nearly 40 years after being built.