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Erykah Badu and The Alchemist just closed an eighteen-month studio run on an album that went nearly a year without a title, revealed only through a hidden decoder site.
Before the World Blows arrived digitally on August 28, closing an eighteen-month collaboration between Erykah Badu and The Alchemist that spent most of the past year without a confirmed title. It is Badu’s first album since 2010’s New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), and her first project of any kind since the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone. The record ultimately came out through Control Freaq, the label Badu launched for the project, alongside a second imprint called Young.
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Badu and The Alchemist met at her annual Birthday Bash in Dallas, a party that has drawn guests like Yasiin Bey, Dave Chappelle and her former partner André 3000 since it started in 2013. The connection predates the party by years. Badu had wanted to rap over The Alchemist’s beat for Mobb Deep‘s 1999 track “The Realest” long before the two ever spoke, and once they did, he began sending her instrumentals while she folded in her own kalimba and Mellotron parts. They recorded across eighteen months split between Dallas and Los Angeles, testing the songs live and phone-free with Badu’s band the Cannabinoids while The Alchemist worked an MPC on stage, something he has said he had never done before.
Erykah Badu & The Alchemist — Before the World Blows (Deluxe)
The album was original titled Abi & Alan, the name behind 2025’s Abi & Alan Tour, and was due out that August 29. It never showed up. The Alchemist publicly denied ever announcing that release date, despite promotional material that listed it, and the project went shh for nearly a year. It resurfaced in August 2026 under the placeholder title Sorry, We Don’t Have an Album Title Yet…, with the real name hidden inside symbols on the cover art that fans had to decode through a dedicated website to unlock. A press rel describes the finish record as moving “from soul, blues, funk, rock, jazz, and underground hip-hop.”
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The finished album runs sixteen tracks and just over an hour, produced almost entirely by the pair with engineering and mixing from Young Guru and Mike Chavarria. Westside Gunn shows up twice, on “Crossfade” and “No I.D.,” Earl Sweatshirt closes the record on “I Know That Man,” and Thundercat, Steve Lacy, DRAM, Kamasi Washington and Joi Gilliam all get features across the tracklist.
Before any of it streamed, Badu and The Alchemist tested the material live at Zepp Yokohama in Japan, playing three phone-free shows there between June 24 and 30, 2025, ahead of a US tour built around the same no-phones policy. A second run, alongside De La Soul and Smino, opened in Highland Park, Illinois on September 10 and wraps in Los Angeles on September 29.
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Physical pressings lean into format detail: a black vinyl split-sleeve 2xLP with a lyric insert and folded poster, a neon orange gatefold pressing, a standard black gatefold, a CD, and two O-card cassette variants that swap which artist gets the black-and-white portrait and which gets the color one, plus a 300-copy Bandcamp-exclusive edition. The album has since charted at number 7 on the UK’s R&B Albums chart and number 32 on Billboard’s US Independent Albums chart.
