808s & Heartbreak Songwriting Credits by Kanye West

808s & Heartbreak is the fourth studio album by Kanye West, released in November 2008 on Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam Records and produced by West with co-production from No I.D., a radical formal departure from all three previous albums in which West sings throughout rather than raps, processing his voice through Auto-Tune as a deliberate artistic choice and constructing an album built almost entirely on synthesizers, drum machines, and the Roland TR-808. The album was made in the aftermath of the death of West's mother Donda West (November 2007) and the end of his engagement to Alexis Phifer, and its emotional register, grief, loneliness, alienation, was unlike anything in mainstream rap at the time. West wrote all his own material; 'Love Lockdown,' 'Heartless,' and 'Paranoid' were the principal singles, with 'Heartless' reaching number eight on the Billboard Hot 100. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and was initially met with polarized critical reaction, with a segment of reviewers arguing that the absence of rapping and the heavy Auto-Tune use were commercial missteps. 808s & Heartbreak is now regarded as one of the most influential albums of the 2000s in terms of its downstream impact on mainstream pop and hip-hop: the vocal Auto-Tune approach directly shaped the careers of Drake, Kid Cudi, Future, Travis Scott, and virtually every artist who adopted confessional melodic rap as their primary mode in the following decade.