tragedy washed over with a doomed resignation." Asad Khawaja wrote that the willingness to stray from genre norms enhanced the album's dramatic realism: "Rather than fall prey to the hip-hop illusions of high life grandeur, The Roots weaves a tale of spiralling downward, made all the more poignant by a character wholly self-aware of his Faustian bargain." Cover The cover art is a black-and-white rendering of the photo "Flying High" by documentary photographer Jamel Shabazz, which depicts a child flipping on a mattress outdoors. The cover art has been compared to the 1978 Charles Burnett film Killer of Sheep. Release and sales Undun was released by Def Jam Recordings, first on December 2, 2011, in continental Europe, then on December 5 in the United Kingdom, and on December 6 in the United States. The album's lead single, "Make My" featuring Big K.R.I.T., was first released on November 1 to iTunes. When undun was released in the US, it debuted at number 17 on the Billboard 200 and sold 48,200 copies in its first week. By January 2012, it had sold 112,000 copies there. Critical reception Undun was met with widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, based on 32 reviews. Reviewing the album for AllMusic, Andy Kellman praised its "existential rhymes" and found its ideas "grave and penetrating". James Lachno from The Daily Telegraph was highly impressed by its music and how The Roots avoid "over-moralising or glorification". Los Angeles Times writer Ernest Hardy said the record offers "a psychological depth and complexity rarely afforded black folks in modern pop culture, including (or especially) the borough of contemporary hip-hop." Jon Pareles, writing in The New York Times, said it is "complete in itself ... made brief to be listened to as a whole." Andy Gill of The Independent said the record is possibly the group's best, offering "opportunities for more considered reflection on the values we choose in life" instead of "the sense of inevitability and the tragic bravado found in comparable hip-hop tragedies". In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot cited Undun as The Roots' best work and called it "both chilling and beautiful at once". At the end of 2011, Kot named it the year's second best album, while Ann Powers from NPR Music ranked it tenth on her year-end