Kirk Franklin GloRilla Collaboration Previews 14th Album Due in October

The Kirk Franklin GloRilla collaboration ‘This Time’, released via Uptown Records, opens the rollout for Franklin’s 14th solo album, I Am What I Am, scheduled for release on 30 October. The pairing brings together a figure who has spent more than three decades navigating gospel, R&B, soul, hip-hop and pop with the Memphis rapper, and the result signals something about where Franklin intends to position the new record.

A Track Built on Interpolation

‘This Time’ draws on Mandrill’s ‘Children Of The Sun’, threading its prominent horn lines and handclaps into the arrangement. That choice of source material is worth sitting with: Mandrill’s early-1970s Afro-Latin funk has a richness and physicality that gospel production rarely reaches for directly, and the interpolation gives ‘This Time’ an unmistakable warmth in its low-end and brass work. Franklin has always been willing to reach across genre boundaries to find the right sonic frame, and the Mandrill lineage gives this collaboration a grounding that feels less like a crossover gesture and more like a genuine aesthetic decision.

The Kirk Franklin GloRilla collaboration extends a pattern in his work that includes previous hip-hop pairings with Chance the Rapper, alongside pop and R&B collaborators such as Mariah Carey, Justin Timberlake and Demi Lovato. Across 21 albums, Franklin has rarely treated genre as a boundary so much as a palette, and ‘This Time’ continues that approach.

Kirk Franklin GloRilla Single Follows a Strong Radio Run

‘This Time’ arrives on the back of Franklin’s previous single, ‘Thank You For Everything’, featuring Karen Clark Sheard of The Clark Sisters. That track received its live television debut when Franklin performed it at the 41st Annual Stellar Gospel Music Awards, with the video later making its broadcast debut on BET Her. According to a press release, ‘Thank You For Everything’ became the fastest-growing record at Gospel radio, a trajectory that will inevitably shape the expectations around ‘This Time’ and the album it previews.

The momentum behind both singles feeds into a broader moment for Franklin. I Am What I Am follows his 2023 release Father’s Day, which earned him his 20th Grammy Award and contained the No. 1 song ‘All Things.’ That is the kind of recent form that makes a new album announcement feel like more than routine business.

A New Label Home and a Wider Creative Slate

I Am What I Am is being released through Uptown Records in conjunction with Franklin’s own Fo Yo Soul Entertainment and TRIBL Music Group, the result of a partnership Franklin entered with the label. The structural arrangement matters because it places Franklin in a position of creative ownership over the project while giving it major-label infrastructure for distribution and radio promotion, which in gospel and Christian music remains the primary route to audience.

Franklin’s activity beyond the album itself underlines how broadly he has expanded his platform. SiriusXM carries Kirk Franklin’s Praise, his dedicated channel. He holds executive-producing credits on BET’s Kingdom Business and Lifetime’s Kirk Franklin’s A Gospel Christmas. In 2025, he launched Den Of Kings, an online series. Each of these ventures extends his reach into media well beyond the album cycle, and they collectively suggest an artist who has thought carefully about how to sustain cultural relevance across platforms and generations.

The Kirk Franklin GloRilla collaboration ‘This Time’ is available to stream now. I Am What I Am is scheduled for release on 30 October, with the Mandrill interpolation at its centre offering one of the more intriguing sonic decisions Franklin has made in recent memory.