“Tomorrow I’ll put out an old tape that some of my fans wanted to hear remastered. This is not a new album just something I’m doing for my fans.”

– @jpegmafia on X, October 23rd 2023

On October 22, 2013, American Rapper and Producer Devon Hendryx released The Ghost~Pop Tape. The album, which is 18 tracks and 52 minutes long, is a mixture of R&B and ambient pop. It revolves mainly around Hendryx’s mental health at the time in 2013, where he was far from home (he was deployed into Japan) and very suicidal. Music is a needed release from the world around him, so what was released was highly emotional and beautifully atmospheric, allowing you to truly understand what Hendryx was going through at the time. 

In May of 2022, the same rapper, now known under the name JPEGMAFIA, was asked about possible remasters of his older work by Unity Radio. Many of his projects under the name Devon Hendryx could not be found on streaming platforms, such as the aforementioned The Ghost~Pop Tape. The idea of remasters also interested many fans because JPEGMAFIA’s style of production has very messy mixing, sometimes making it hard to heard vocal performances. In the interview, he was asked specifically about The Ghost~Pop Tape and another album Darkskin Manson. Although he believed some of his older works were not good enough to get a re-release, he did have plans to work on one for Ghost~Pop.

A day after the tenth anniversary of its release, The Ghost~Pop Tape (Remaster + Original) was put out on streaming platforms on October 23rd, 2023. It included the original 18 tracks, 4 bonus tracks, and 17 remastered tracks. Many changes were made to the audio, and many of them can be found in the first track “Ballad of A Poor Man”. Some of the cloudiness of the production was cleared, the vocals were redone and refined, some excess noises were removed (such as a phone notification in the intro), and an extra sample in the end of the song. Two songs were also removed from the track list via combining them with other songs, like how “Missing image file_maladaptivedaydreaming.gif” was added to “God Bless My Homegirls”. 

While some may say that the enhanced audio improves the album greatly, a lot of fans think the undermixed sound was what gave the album its emotional impact. Although with its problems, fans finally have the remaster they have wanted for so long.