In the summer of 2025, audiences in Seattle, Miami, Toronto and Austin heard an entire Erykah Badu album. They could not photograph it, could not record it, and could not stream a note of it afterwards. Their phones were sealed in locked pouches at the door.
That album, Before the World Blows, was released on 28 August 2026 — more than a year after those rooms had already heard it.
Sixteen Years Between Studio Albums
The wait is the context for everything else. Badu’s last project of any kind was the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone, and her last studio album was New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh) in 2010.
She had not been absent, only unrecorded. In the interim she featured on Jamie xx’s “F.U.” and won her fifth Grammy for her appearance on Rapsody’s “3:AM”. But for an artist of her standing, sixteen years without a studio album is long enough that the return itself becomes the story.
The record answers that with volume: seventeen tracks running sixty-two minutes and fifty-two seconds, released through her own label, Control Freaq, alongside Young.
It Began With a Mobb Deep B-Side
The partnership has an unusually precise origin. Badu wanted to rap over the instrumental from Mobb Deep’s “The Realest”, a 1999 track produced by the Alchemist, and that is what took her to him.
They met at her annual Birthday Bash in Dallas, an event running since 2013 whose guests have included Yasiin Bey, Dave Chappelle and André 3000. The interest was mutual and predated the meeting; the Alchemist had wanted to work with her for years.
When the collaboration produced its first single in June 2025, it was called “Next to You”, and it sampled that same Mobb Deep track. The circle closed on itself.
Two Opposed Methods, Deliberately Collided
The pairing is less obvious than the results make it sound. The Alchemist is a boom-bap revivalist whose catalogue runs through Freddie Gibbs, Boldy James, Roc Marciano, Earl Sweatshirt, Conway the Machine and Action Bronson — a producer who builds from found records.
Badu works the other way, from live players and atmosphere. What they did was push the two into each other: he sent instrumentals, and she brought her own instruments into his samples rather than singing over them. The album is credited to the Alchemist, Badu and Mike Chavarria, recorded across more than eighteen months split between Dallas and Los Angeles.
Speaking on Drink Champs, the Alchemist compared learning from her approach to what he took from DJ Muggs as a teenager, which is a substantial thing for an established producer to say about a singer. Our piece on what neo-soul actually described covers the tradition she is working from.
The Tour Was the Studio’s Last Room
Testing an unreleased record in front of paying audiences is the part worth pausing on. Through 2024 and 2025 the pair played the material in what they described as intimate, phone-free settings, Badu with her collective the Cannabinoids and the Alchemist working an MPC.
He had never used the MPC on stage before; she talked him into it. He has also admitted to nerves, playing alongside a band that leans on improvisation and intuition rather than a fixed arrangement — which is a fair description of the gap between making a beat and performing one.
The Abi and Alan Tour opened in Seattle on 8 August 2025 and closed in Austin on 24 August, after three shows at KT Zepp Yokohama in Japan that June. From 1 August it was confirmed that the record, then titled Abi & Alan, would be previewed exclusively at those shows. Security sealed phones in pouches on the way in.
The logic is straightforward, if unusual. A record played live before release gets edited against real reactions instead of studio assumptions, and the phone ban keeps it from leaking in fragments while that is happening.
It is also a real commercial sacrifice. The clips that normally carry a rollout — a chorus filmed on a phone, a verse cut into a fifteen-second video — are exactly what the pouches prevent. Trading that reach for a room that is actually listening is a choice very few artists at her level make, and it only works if the audience will buy a ticket on the name alone.
A Rollout That Kept Going Wrong in Public
The announcement arc alone ran a year and a half. Word that the two were working together surfaced in January 2025, with the Alchemist calling the project life-altering. A snippet appeared on Instagram the following month, apparently titled “Valentine”. Badu made it official on 19 March in a Billboard interview, and confirmed in June that it would come out on Control Freaq, her own label.
“Next to You” followed on 20 June 2025, the morning after a Dallas performance live-streamed as part of Amazon Music’s Juneteenth special Forever in Rotation. A second track, “Echos 19 (mix 122)”, was previewed alongside it.
None of it ran smoothly. The album was first pencilled for 29 August before being postponed, with the Alchemist publicly denying it would appear that day. The title changed from Abi & Alan to Before the World Blows. The original lead single was replaced.
“Next to You” also drew immediate criticism when it arrived, for artwork widely identified as AI-generated and noted as resembling the cover of Sonic Youth’s Goo. The Alchemist answered his critics on X with, by one account, humour, sarcasm and a few philosophical jabs.
The reset came on 13 August 2026 with a new single, “Witch Doctor”, and a firm date. The track runs six and a half minutes as a hypnotic drift, Badu offering to break a curse because she is a “witch, oooh, doctor”, and pausing mid-song to list the witches she is not: Elphaba, Glinda, Ursula, Sabrina, Maleficent, Stevie Nicks, Broom-Hilda and Agatha. The Alchemist’s slow beat gathers underneath it into something closer to a campfire drum circle.
What the Album Is Reaching For
By its own account the record moves through soul, blues, funk, rock, jazz and underground hip-hop, which is a wide brief and only workable because both participants have spent careers refusing to sit in one lane.
The guest list reads across both their address books rather than either one. Westside Gunn appears twice, on “I Just Play a Part” and “No I.D.”; Earl Sweatshirt takes “I Know That Man”; Thundercat plays on “They Ain’t You”; Steve Lacy shares “To the Moon (Plan C)”; DRAM sings on “Valentine”, the track first glimpsed in that Instagram snippet; and Jay Electronica wrote the one-minute “Abracadabra”. The opener, “Echos”, runs seven and a half minutes, which sets the pace fairly.
The through-line is method rather than genre: his sample discovery and manipulation set against her melodic, atmospheric writing, with each given room to alter the other. A producer’s album with a singer on top would have been easier and would not have taken eighteen months.
The pair head out again with De La Soul and Smino from September. For a record that has already been performed in full to rooms full of locked phones, the tour is less a promotional obligation than a return to where it was finished.
Before the World Blows is out now on Control Freaq and Young.
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