December 8, 2021 marks two years since the world lost Juice WRLD to an accidental overdose. Two days following this sad anniversary, his estate will drop Fighting Demons, his second posthumous album, and fans got a taste today (Dec. 3) with “Wandered To LA.” In the new song, Juice (born Jarad Higgins) teams up with Justin Bieber, both confronting their demons as they sing about drug use and mental health.
“I wandered to LA hopin’ to explore, little did I know, I’d find a little more,” he sings. “Love at my hotel room door, from the bed to the hotel room floor.” Later, he touches on substance issues and mental health. “Maybe it’s the love, maybe it’s the drugs, maybe it’s because my girlfriend is the plug,” he sings, later adding, “She loves drugs, she goes hardcore, she’s hidin’ from the truth, inside of the rug . . . you see the ghost on her front porch, you see the blood at her front door.”
“Wandered to LA” comes three weeks after “Already Dead,” the first single from Fighting Demons. That was a song fans were demanding for years. Juice WRLD first previewed the track on his Instagram in 2018, per Genius. After his passing in 2019, some thought the song had been lost. However, in March 2021, Lil Bibby – the manager of Juice’s label, Grade A Productions – tweeted a snippet of the track, along with the message, “I will find it and it will be on the album.” A few months later, Juice’s co-manager Peter Jideonwo confirmed that the track had been discovered. “Bibby found Already Dead!!!” he posted to Instagram. “The song is most likely going to be on the album. This is the song everyone wants and now, we will finally get it.”
Two years since Juice WRLD’s accidental overdose, “Already Dead” showed an artist struggling with mental health and substance issues. “ You can see the pain in my laugh,” he raps on the chorus. “Demons comin’ back from the past / Feelin’ like I’m ’bout to relapse / Voices in my head / All I can hear them say / Is everyone wants me dead / Bitch, I’m already dead.”
Fighting Demons — once thought to be called The Party Never Ends — is the follow-up to Juice’s first posthumous album, 2020’s Legends Never Die. Juice’s mother, Carmela Wallace, announced on Nov. 11 that the album would arrive in early December, shortly after the two-year anniversary of his death. “There was nothing Jarad ‘Juice WRLD’ Higgins enjoyed more than delivering new music to his millions of fans around the world,” she said in a statement, per Rolling Stone. “He left behind an astonishingly deep catalog of music that will ensure his fans will have new songs to listen to for years to come. Jarad was always searingly honest about his struggles and through his musical genius, he articulated what was on his heart and mind vividly through his art. He never gave up and his friends and family never gave up on offering their support to him.”
2021 will close out with more Juice WRLD. HBO announced the release dates for the new slate of films in its Music Box series, per Pitchfork. This round of documentaries will cover Alanis Morissette, DMX, Kenny G, Juice, and Robert Stigwood, the man behind Saturday Night Fever. Juice’s documentary, Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss, will premiere on December 16. It will be the last documentary to air, following Jagged (Nov. 18) DMX: Don’t Try to Understand (Nov. 25), Listening to Kenny G (Dec. 2), and Mr. Saturday Night (Dec. 9).