Kardinal Offishall has formed his own label, Black Stone Colleagues, and plans to drop his new album, 'Mr. International,' in early 2011. Akon, who signed the highly regarded Toronto rapper/producer in 2007 and released his last album, 'Not 4 Sale,' featuring the smash 'Dangerous,' is still involved.

"He's going to be executive producing it," Kardi tells The BoomBox. "It's going to be through my label with a major distributor. Basically, all it is is I was signed to Akon; he was distributed through whatever; we just moved Akon's company out of the way and he allowed me to do it directly." The album will be released in different territories -- New Zealand, Australia, France, Japan, the U.K. and U.S. -- at different times. Kardi, a patriotic Canadian, just finished shooting the video for the first street single, 'The Anthem,' an homage to Toronto.

"I don't think there's much that we didn't get," he says of capturing the city's various communities. It also features several cameos, including K'Naan and popular Canadian talk show host George Stroumboulopoulos. It should be serviced to video outlets in two weeks.

"I'm still one of those nostalgic people that likes to see the stuff on TV first," Kardi says. "YouTube still has a weird stigma attached to it anyway because anybody can do a video for YouTube at anytime. This is gonna be a proper [release]. You can't just have George Stroumboulopoulos and K'Naan, and all these people, do all these cameos in your video and, oh yeah, it's just a viral video."

Kardi plans to drop the second single in January. "Ninety percent that it's gonna be 'Piece of Mind' and it also features two other Canadians, T-Minus who did the beat; he's produced for Ciara, for Ludacris, blah blah blah, and then August Rigo. He's signed to Def Jam. So that's the Canadian triple threat."

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