It seems like producing the best album of last year and releasing a new song for (almost) every Friday since late August hasn’t quite justified a holiday for Mr West. Later this year, Def Jam are putting out the collaboration album he and Jay-Z have recorded, Watch the Throne, which Kanye’s described as ‘dark and sexy, couture hip-hop’, and here’s the first cut. Taking up where Jay-Z left off on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy highlight ’So Appalled’, ‘Ye and Hov cover familiar, if a little well-worn, ground, mocking amateur posers and boasting why they’re hard as a motherfucker (geddit?). Lyrically, it may not be a career best for either, but musically the track take’s ...Fantasy’s bombast and throws it a grandiose, aww-what-the-hell sucker-punch. Rick Ross favourite Lex Luger is on production duties, and sets his 808 to rapid-fire mode, laying down a ferocious beat that gets mapped on to a spindly arpeggiating synth line. The coda is beautifully overwrought: the drums and synths drop out, leaving just a sole piano and an octave-scaling choral section. Sinister strings surge in for the last thirty seconds, and that’s it, over, a 4:38 tour-de-force.

It may not have won over the US charts, getting pipped to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 by Britney’s comeback single, but at least that gave reason for Kanye to drop a nicely self-deprecating reference to that Taylor Swift moment, Tweeting ‘Yo Britney, I'm really happy for you and I'mma let you be #1, but me and Jay-Z single is one of the best songs of all time!’ While we’ll have to wait until March to hear the rest of the long-player, this taster suggests couture hip-hop could give 2011 that certain je ne sais quoi. Hopefully, by then Kanye can lay to rest any throne-stealing concerns (and, maybe, just maybe, take a break).

Laurie Tuffrey blogs at http://blogs.varsity.co.uk/vulture