Erykah Badu & The Alchemist ‘Before the World Blows’

FIRST LISTEN: ERYKAH BADU AND THE ALCHEMIST TAKE A HYPNOTICALLY DARK, PSYCHEDELIC DETOUR ON ‘Before the World Blows’

After years of anticipation, Erykah Badu and The Alchemist have released their collaborative album, Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment, via Control FREAQ Records / Young Recordings. It is Badu’s first official studio album in 16 years, though very little about it sounds like someone trying to stage a grand return.

The project started more than three years ago after Badu told longtime creative partner Cold Cris that she had always wanted to rap over Mobb Deep’s “The Realest,” a 1999 Alchemist production. The two were introduced soon after. Their first Los Angeles session produced “Next 2 U,” and what started there eventually grew into an 18-month recording process split between Dallas and Los Angeles.

The interesting thing is how little Before the World Blows sounds like Badu simply stepping into The Alchemist’s world. He gives her dusty drums, jazz-heavy samples and live instrumentation, then mostly stays out of the way. Beats loosen, arrangements drift, songs change shape. Badu sings when she wants to, raps when she wants to and slips into spoken word without making much distinction between any of it.

You know what kind of record this is almost immediately.

“Echos” runs for more than seven minutes and refuses to hurry. Badu moves through spirituality, racial division and the systems that keep people separated, circling back eventually to music as the one thing capable of cutting through some of it. It’s sprawling, occasionally messy and completely committed to its own pace.

“I Just Play A Part” gets stranger. Soul and psychedelia bleed into something almost ceremonial, while “Witch Doctor” finds Badu poking at the mystical image that has followed her for years. She plays with ideas around mediums, media and belief until the distinctions between them start to blur.

The record gets more intimate without necessarily getting simpler. “They Ain’t You,” featuring Thundercat, sits with patience and devotion. “To The Moon (Plan C),” with Steve Lacy, starts closer to romance before an unexpected pregnancy changes the weight of the song. Love on this album tends to arrive with something attached to it: doubt, consequence, time passing.

There are a lot of guests, but the album rarely feels crowded. Westside Gunn appears twice, with Earl Sweatshirt, DRAM, Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Joi, DJ Creole Princess and Kamasi Washington also moving through the record. Washington’s saxophone closes things out on “Black Box.” The names span generations, but Badu never feels like she’s borrowing relevance from any of them. If anything, they enter her orbit.

Some of the looseness probably comes from the way these songs were allowed to develop. Between 2024 and 2025, Badu and The Alchemist tested material in intimate, phone-free performances with Badu’s digital collective The Cannabinoids. The songs had room to mutate before anyone decided what the finished versions were supposed to be.

That matters, because Before the World Blows often sounds like an album that resisted being finished in the conventional sense.

After 16 years, Badu could have made a record designed to remind everyone why they missed her. She doesn’t seem especially interested in that. Her past is still there, obviously. You can hear pieces of Baduizm, Mama’s Gun and New Amerykah in the way she phrases, wanders and refuses to land where you expect. But she isn’t trying to recreate any of them.

The album is loose, psychedelic and sometimes frustratingly unwilling to resolve itself. That is also what makes it work. The Alchemist gives Badu enough room to follow a thought too far, double back or leave it hanging.

For a comeback 16 years in the making, Before the World Blows barely behaves like a comeback at all. It sounds more like Badu picking up a conversation she never considered finished.

STANDOUT TRACKS TO START WITH: “Echos,” “I Just Play A Part,” “Witch Doctor” and “Black Box.”

Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment is available now via Control FREAQ Records / Young Recordings.