“Welcome To Heartbreak” swells with submarine chords and marching 808 beats, all tied up with a fluttering piano lead that sounds graceful, a quality that is not just unusual for hip-hop, but to R&B too - Kanye was crafting a unique sound in a genre that he didn’t regularly associate with. In order to effectively channel his emotions, he abandoned rapping altogether, instead grabbing autotune - a contentious tool that had already been popularised in hip-hop by T-Pain and Lil Wayne - by both hands, and twisting it to create sublime but mechanised despair. Pile on a ended engagement with Alexis Phifer and swarming media scrutiny, and the result was a downward spiral for Yeezy. However, it was also the year in which his mother, Donda West, passed away. He dethroned 50 Cent to become the biggest rapper in the world with the release of his synthesized third album, Graduation.

'If spring can take the snow away / Can it melt away all of our mistakes?' he asks mournfully, answered only by an echo of the exact same question.2007 was one of a pivotal year for Kanye West in a myriad of ways. 'Coldest Winter' specifically is dedicated to his late mother. Kanye's pain over these losses is palpable throughout the album. If I'd never made it in the music business, it never would have happened.' 'I feel like I moved to California, then my mom moved to California,' West told the Guardian, 'and she did stuff she wouldn't have done if we'd stayed in Chicago. West blamed himself in part for his mother's untimely end.

He also split from his fiancee, Alexis Phifer, after an 18-month engagement. In the years before the album's release, Kanye lost his mother, Donda West, whom he had immortalized in his music several times before, to complications from a cosmetic surgery. 'The type of ideas that it was coming up with, the melodies that were in me - what was in me I couldn't stop.'

'It was just what was in my heart,' the rapper told MTV Europe at the time. This calculated, morose meditation was the only album that Kanye could make at this point in his life.

Kanye west 808s and heartbreak tracks