André 3000 has made a short film to accompany 7 Piano Sketches, the EP he released last year as a quiet, instrumental detour. Co-written with Graham Mason, the film is currently available only on Mubi, behind the service’s paywall.
Its premise is direct: André walks to work carrying a piano strapped to his back, a notebook of sketches in hand. Along the way he meets characters whose details echo the instrument he lugs through the city. The image isn’t entirely new — he arrived at the 2025 Met Gala with a similar piano-backpack — but it’s unknown whether that footage appears here.
The film arrives after a period of deliberate redefinition. New Blue Sun (2023), his first solo album, abandoned rapping for flute-led compositions that drifted close to new age. 7 Piano Sketches went further into wordless territory. André once described the EP’s working title as “The Best Worst Rap Album In History,” calling it the freest he’d felt emotionally — a palette cleanser with no lyrics at all.
The Mubi release fits a pattern: instead of broad promotion, a contained, self-selected audience. For an artist whose creative curiosity now moves farther from commercial expectation, that scarcity may be part of the point.
