Earlier this month, Mary J. Blige announced her forthcoming album The London Sessions and she just released two new cuts, "Whole Damn Year" and "Therapy," from her latest studio effort.
"Whole Damn Time," a heart wrenching track highlighted by a minimalistic piano, is a song about a bad breakup that left Blige emotionally scarred.
"It took a whole damn year to repair my body / It's been a bad five years / Gone take a long, long year for me to trustsomebody," she sings.
She followed up with the release of "Therapy," a doo-wop song co-written by Sam Smith and inspired by Amy Winehouse.
Take a listen to both tracks after the jump.
"It's different, but it still has Mary J. Blige's DNA in it," she told Elvis Duran.
In a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the album, Blige spoke highly of her time overseas and working to create a different sound.
"To work in these environments and to see these major superstars with all these no. 1 records – how can I describe it?," She says in the video. "They're not full of themselves. They're just having fun, and it was just a pleasure. It was like so refreshing."
While working on her new project, Blige said being in London brings back memories of the freedom American music once had.
"Our idea was to become part of London, to really embrace the culture, to really live in it," Blige told The Guardian. "The music is free over here the way it used to be in the States. Artists are just free to do what they love. Listening to the radio you can hear the freedom. The music is living and breathing - you can hear that from Adele's last album."
As previously reported by Idolator, the song "Therapy" will be the album's lead single and will be made available on iTunes on Sept. 23.
