Their albums sprawl towards the hour-and-a-half-mark, stuffed with appearances by special guests that sometimes seem to speak less of artistic fraternity and more of ensuring every commercial base is covered. You can mock his fans’ bragging about the “purity” of his achievements if you want, but there’s also a sense in which Cole has become famous by doing exactly the opposite of virtually every other major contemporary hip-hop artist. “How about I don’t? How about you just get the fuck off my dick?” And so it proves: kiLL edward turns out to be Cole himself, his vocals slowed down, the reverse of Prince’s helium-voiced Camille. It takes KOD a matter of minutes to announce that the latter is very wrong: “How come you won’t get a few features – I think you should?” Coles snaps on the title track. One school of thought suggested the presence of kiLL edward was all an elaborate hoax, another that the “experimental” nature of his fifth album might include a slackening of his aversion to sharing space with others. The one thing everyone knows about J Cole is that his albums almost never feature special guests – after his album 2014 Forest Hills Drive broke a Spotify streaming record previously held by One Direction, the phrase “ J Cole went platinum with no features” turned from endlessly repeated boast to internet meme. W hen J Cole announced the imminent arrival of KOD earlier this week, some of excitement was caused by the tracklisting: not the titles themselves so much as the fact that two of them seemed to feature a guest appearance, albeit from a hitherto-unknown artist called kiLL edward.