Erykah Badu and The Alchemist. Photo: Adraint Bereal
Out now on Control FREAQ Records and Young Recordings
It’s a tale as old as the mixing console: woman and man make joint album. Man is assumed the producer. Woman the singer. But Erykah Badu isn’t standing for any of that. Ahead of her new collaboration with revered rap studio whiz the Alchemist this week, the Texan firebrand released a video where she set the record straight.
“There’s a mythology going around that this is an Erykah Badu album produced by the Alchemist,” she began. “No. I am the executive producer. I was there from inception to the mix.” She took the Alchemist’s beats and reconstructed them with her own vision. “This is for the ladies who are often told to take their place or take their seat, when we are composers and producers … and visionaries. I’ve been doing this for 30 years the same way … I co-produce, co-mix, co-edit, co-master in some cases. My ears are lethal. I ain’t just a singer: this is my production and my heart.”
It’s true that only Erykah Badu could have a comedy skit on her album where she gets her bits waxed. Only Badu would have got her Mama’s Gun collaborator DJ Quik in to play wood block. Only Badu could humblebrag that her witchcraft is beyond the sanitised media version of practical magic (Glenda, Sabrina, Stevie Nicks …), that she is channelling something deeper, as a frenetic patchwork of ceremonial drums rises. And that’s only skimming the cauldron of Before the World Blows: the Abi and Alan Experiment.
This is a comeback for Badu of sorts, her first body of work since 2015 and three decades since her debut Baduizm turned her into the poster woman for a jazzy, spiritually minded style of American R&B dubbed “neo soul”, a sound that can now be heard across generations of women in music, from SZA to Cleo Sol. In the intervening years, Badu has trained as a doula, raised her children, toured extensively and retained the kind of clout that attracts Vogue covers and icon awards. But, what with the impending apocalypse, she’s finally, thankfully, got her skates on, started her own label and teamed up with one of the finest hip-hop craftsmen since her late friend J Dilla to make some magic.
To call this album an “experiment” is a bit of a disservice: BTWB is a multi-layered epic that unfurls like a hazy all-nighter. It calls on an A-list of characterful rap, R&B and jazz guest stars, including Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Westside Gunn and Earl Sweatshirt to light the match, with a loose theme of gender politics and embracing what matters before the world ends (and returning to familiar Baduizms like fuckbois and free-thinking).
Badu’s spoken-word stream of consciousness on Black Box – surely among her best lyrics yet – threads across the track’s inky swing
Over 16 tracks, there’s a lot to unpack: boom-bap psychedelia, thick with smoke; a lot of 1970s jazz-rock influences; the coasting energy of a mixtape. It has a largely syrupy pace that gives space to Badu’s chameleonic vocals – see the pitched-up trap rapper of Hot Bibi or her sweet R&B delivery on Crossfade, flirting with today’s chart sounds while never fully committing. Blasts of gospel (I Know That Man with Earl Sweatshirt) sit alongside the tender soul of To The Moon (Plan C) with Steve Lacy and reluctant-player anthem They Ain’t You, with her former band member Thundercat on backing coos and bass. There are glimmers of Badu the woman, though they’re not especially centred. The aforementioned Crossfade gives some clues: rooted in a multilayered harmonic jazz sound inspired by legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius, she depicts herself as solo at the bar, a “risk-taker” looking for both a gentle lover and a troublemaker.
But this isn’t just about Badu, and she and the Alchemist leave their best till last. The Afrofuturistic psychedelic jazz of Black Box is a masterpiece – even if it ends a little abruptly – based around a digger’s delight sample of 1978’s Ouagadougou by Mickey Baker and the Alex Sanders Funk Time Band. Badu’s spoken-word stream of consciousness – surely among her best lyrics yet – threads across the track’s inky swing, using the black box as a metaphor for portals, phone addiction, capitalism and “pussy”, as LA saxophonist Kamasi Washington adds fluttering accents with his brass.
This album is not about instant gratification or mega hooks – it’s more like the soundtrack that plays when the last ashes settle on the ground, a meandering haze that takes you someplace else with each listen. As Badu’s waxer says in that skit on the brilliantly funny Love Me Not, to sit with it and get the best results, “you have to unclench your ass”.
Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.