Songfacts®:

• When J. Cole jumped on Drake's October 2023 For All The Dogs track "First Person Shooter," he pushed the idea that he, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar run the rap game. Six months later, Lamar fired back at "First Person Shooter" on Future and Metro Boomin's joint "Like That," off their album We Don't Trust You. Lamar shut down Cole's "Big Three" claim, declaring himself the sole ruler of rap. Lamar's dissing was mainly aimed at Drake, but he threw a few shots Cole's way.
  
  Cole isn't one to back down. "7 Minute Drill" is his clap back to Lamar's diss verse. The last track on his mixtape Might Delete Later, it finds him setting the record straight.
• Over T-Minus' cold beat, Cole gets straight to the point with the chorus. He calls out Lamar's attack and the clap-back it stirred up.
  
  Cole comes in strong on the first verse, likening Lamar to a washed-up cartoon show:
  
  I'm reppin' the 'Ville, I'm cool under pressure
  He still on stage, but faded like The Simpsons
  
  Then Cole takes aim at K. Dot's albums, dissing Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers as "tragic" and claiming To Pimp A Butterfly put people to sleep. Grammy talk doesn't faze him - he's got his own take. Lamar's got trophies, but Cole isn't impressed.
  
  In the next lines, Cole does the math and figures out that Lamar delivers one hard verse roughly every 2.5 years.
  
  He's dropping one Heart verse every 30 months or something
  If he wasn't dissing, we wouldn't be talking
  
  That checks out, as the average distance between K-Dot releases - Section.80, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, To Pimp A Butterfly, Untitled Unmastered, DAMN, and Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers - is about 30 months.
• When we get to the second part, Conductor Williams takes over the beat from T-Minus and Cole repeats how he didn't want this beef. Lamar poked, so Cole's setting the record straight - Lamar's only got four albums in 12 years, and Cole's not backing down.
  
  Cole ends with a bold claim: He could drop two classics right now, hinting at his next move in the outro.
  
  Hah, let me chill out, man, Conductor
  The Fall Off on the way
• The title of the track references Cole's "7 Minute Drills." The rapper's manager Ibrahim Hamad explained in 2023 during an appearance on the Say Less podcast that Cole will rap for seven minutes straight over a few different beats as an exercise to break writer's block.
  
  "He does these seven-minute drills that he got Cozz be doing... He'll just be like, 'You got seven minutes.' It's basically his way of breaking out of overthinking," the Dreamville co-founder said. "Like don't even think about it. Start a verse - what we gon' talk about? He'll be like, 'Cozz, write a verse about pizza.' They got seven minutes and they put the timer on."
• According to T-Minus, "7 Minute Drill" was created during one of his writing exercises. After "Like That" was released, Cole and T-Minus met at a recording studio to work on a writing drill. The challenge began with T-Minus quickly creating an instrumentation within the seven-minute timeframe.
  
  "So after I did my seven-minute beat, I was like, 'It's your turn.' He's like, 'Yo, give me a word.' So I looked at my FL Studio system and I saw the word 'light,' so I was like, 'light.' He took it from there and started with 'light,'" T-Minus told Complex. "I left the room, gave him seven minutes, and came back. He's like, 'Yo, just give me another seven minutes. I think I've got something going.' And, you know, the rest is history."
• J. Cole publicly acknowledged his regret for throwing shade at Kendrick Lamar on "7 Minute Drill." This act of contrition came during his performance at the Dreamville Festival in North Carolina on April 7, 2024.
  
  "I'm so proud of (Might Delete Later), except for one part," said Cole. "It's one part of that s--t that makes me feel like, man that's the lamest s--t I did in my f--kin' life, right? And I know this is not what a lot of people want to hear... But I gotta keep it 100 with y'all, I damn near had a relapse, right?"
  
  The rapper explained that he felt pressured by others to respond to Lamar's guest verse on "Like That."
  
  "I tried to jab my n--ga back and I tried to keep it friendly but at the end of the day, when I listen to it and it comes out and I see the talk, that s--t don't sit right with my spirit," Cole confessed. "That s--t disrupts my f--kin' peace."
  
  Cole removed the track from all streaming services on April 12, 2024, seven days after its release.