Act II: Patents of Nobility (The Turn) is Jay Electronica’s long-awaited follow-up to Act I, originally slated to release for years before his debut album, A Written Testimony, which was assumed to never release until 2020. On September 20, 2020, a leaker claimed he had found a version of the project from the specific date of September 3, 2012, and he would release it if he was crowdfunded $9,000. Within twelve days, various Jay Electronica fans had completed the funding, and he leaked the album to the public. Jay E’s team was aware of the buy happening and claimed various times within a Discord server that the leak was actually exciting for Jay E, and depending on fan reaction once it leaked, he might officially release it.
When the project leaked, Jay E tweeted that he was overwhelmed from all the positive reactions to the project, and his manager even tweeted out a SoundCloud link to the leak. However, it’s important to note that the leaker accidentally leaked the project with a typo in the title: a “The” was written before “Patents” when that was never actually meant to be in the title. The title was always meant to be Act II: Patents of Nobility (The Turn).
A day after the leak occurred, Jay’s team had uploaded that exact leaked zip onto Tidal, not a mixed and mastered version. They also accidentally left it to include the typo with the extra “The” in the title, just like the leaked zip, so it is now canonically the official title. There have been mixed signals over whether a final mixed and mastered version would be released onto all platforms, but knowing how long this project took to come out, if that is the plan, it likely won’t happen for a long time.