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The Alchemist says he doesn’t chase his favorite beat. He chases whatever gets an artist writing, whether that’s Yasiin Bey, 2 Chainz, or Larry June.
The clip is short, and it circulated on Complex‘s Instagram under a simple headline: The Alchemist reveals his secret to being a good producer. What follows is not a technical trick or a piece of studio gear. It is a working philosophy the veteran producer has clearly thought about for a long time.
Asked how he juggles projects as different as a Southern trap veteran and a jazz-inflected lyricist like Yasiin Bey, Alchemist described his own role as secondary to the artist’s. A beat, in his framing, is just a bed for someone else to lie down on, and it does not need to be his favorite one or even an objectively great one. It needs to do one specific job: get the artist writing. As he put it to Complex, he tries to figure out what moves their pen. He said he sacrifices a beat he personally likes for the sake of a better song constantly, describing it as something that happens all the time, because what an artist ultimately writes over a beat is what decides whether that beat mattered at all.
It is a modest-sounding answer for someone with his track record, and that seems to be the point. The secret is not a sound. It is a habit of paying closer attention to the person across the room than to the machine in front of him.
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The quote comes from a longer Complex interview built around Life Is Beautiful, the collide album Larry June, 2 Chainz, and Alchemist rel on February 7, 2025, through ALC Records and Empire Distribution, with every beat handle by Alchemist himself. It marked the second full-length pairing between Larry June and Alchemist, following 2023’s The Great Escape, and it doubled as 2 Chainz’s first major release since leaving Def Jam Recordings after two decades on the label.
By Alchemist’s own account elsewhere in the same conversation, the project started smaller than it ended up. The plan was a short five-song run, but the sessions kept producing material strong enough that a short project turned into a full eleven-track album, preceded by the singles “Bad Choices” and “I Been” that January. The finished record went on to reach the UK’s Official Albums Chart, a modest but real sign of how far outside hip-hop’s usual channels the trio’s chemistry traveled.
On paper, a laid-back San Francisco rapper, an Atlanta trap veteran, and a sample-driven East Coast producer make an unlikely trio. 2 Chainz himself has been candid about why it worked: he has described feeling more comfortable rapping over Alchemist’s understated production than over the trap beats that built his career, a deliberate stretch rather than an accident. In practice, all three have said the shared thread was less about genre and more about storytelling and a certain unhurried, detail-oriented style of writing, which lines up exactly with what Alchemist described as his method: find the version of the beat that gets each of them writing in that register, rather than forcing one sound onto all three.
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The specific names Alchemist reached for while explaining himself, Yasiin Bey, 2 Chainz, and Larry June, were not random. Around the same stretch of 2025 that produced Life Is Beautiful, Alchemist was also working across a genuinely wide spread of other projects: Abi & Alan with Erykah Badu, Goldfish with Hit-Boy, Alfredo 2 with Freddie Gibbs, Infinite with Mobb Deep, Mercy with the duo Armand Hammer, and a still-pending full-length with Yasiin Bey himself. Each of those artists writes in a different register entirely, from Badu’s psych-soul phrasing to Gibbs’ rapid-fire street narratives, which makes the “moves their pen” idea less like a soundbite and more like a description of how he was actually spending his year.
The same principle held up even when Alchemist had no idea what an artist was going to do with a beat. In that same February interview cycle, he addressed his production credit on Kendrick Lamar’s “Meet the Grahams,” a pointed diss track aimed at Drake that became one of 2024’s most talked-about hip-hop moments. Alchemist said he had sent Kendrick the beat months before the song ever surfaced and had no advance knowledge of what it would become, hearing the finished track for the first time along with everyone else. He described it as the kind of situation he generally tries to stay out of, while acknowledging that it sometimes happens regardless. The episode is a fairly literal version of his own stated approach: he hands over the bed, and what gets written on it, sometimes to consequences well beyond his control, is the artist’s decision entirely.
That same interview run brought news of another project built on the same instinct. Speaking on the radio show The Breakfast Club that February, Alchemist revealed he and longtime Mobb Deep producer Havoc were working on a new Mobb Deep album, with Nas contributing as well, continuing the group’s catalog following the 2017 death of Prodigy. He described Prodigy’s unreleased material as extensive and ahead of its time, framing the new project as a continuation of that catalog rather than a replacement for it. Once again, the job was the same one he described to Complex: figure out what serves the artist’s voice, in this case a voice no longer present to weigh in directly, and build around that rather than around his own preferences.
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Alchemist’s own description of his workday backs up the philosophy. He has said he prefers to start early, around 7 a.m., at his studio in Santa Monica, working alongside a drum machine, a turntable, synthesizers, and a personal vinyl collection he has, by his own account, listened to in full. He has said he will not buy a record without hearing the entire thing first, still searching for something to sample after three decades of doing exactly that. Given how much he has released in a single year, the space stays in a state of organized clutter: stacked vinyl copies of his 2024 solo release The Genuine Articulate and piled sneaker boxes reportedly mark the doorway into the room.
The studio doubles as something like an archive of the relationships the philosophy has produced. Platinum plaques with Kendrick Lamar, Fat Joe, and Mobb Deep line the walls, evidence of a career built less on a signature sound than on repeatedly finding the right one for whoever he is working with. A bicycle that belonged to the late Los Angeles skate and music figure Spanto reportedly hangs from the ceiling nearby, the kind of personal object that turns a workspace into something closer to a scrapbook of who has passed through it. Even his social calendar tracks the same collaborators: he was set to reunite with Larry June and 2 Chainz on stage at the Camp Flog Gnaw festival later that year, taking the Life Is Beautiful chemistry from the studio to a live audience.
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The same February press run had Alchemist addressing a different but related idea: gatekeeping in the music industry, which he was openly critical of. Appearing alongside Larry June and 2 Chainz on The Breakfast Club, he said he viewed people who withhold access or introductions from newer artists as insecure, contrast that with his own early break. He credited DJ Premier, the veteran Gang Starr producer, with introducing him to Jay-Z early in his career, describing the moment as an example of confidence rather than gatekeeping, since Premier had nothing to lose by putting him in the room. Alchemist said the two spoke several more times after that introduction, and that he had played Jay-Z a beat that later became Jadakiss’s “We Gonna Make It” instead. He has separately acknowledged that his close ties to Mobb Deep, whose Prodigy had a long-running feud with Jay-Z, likely complicated any deeper collab with him at the time, a wrinkle he has described as part of the past rather than a grievance.
That same instinct toward opening doors rather than closing them shows up in how Life Is Beautiful itself came together. 2 Chainz has said publicly that he was already a fan of Larry June’s before the album, having pushed friends and fellow artists to listen to him for years, and that Larry June’s own team and infrastructure, paired with Alchemist’s stand, made the three-way connection an easy sell once it came together. Either it is a beat built around what moves a specific artist’s pen or an introduction made without expecting anything back, the through-line in Alchemist’s own account of his career is the same: the work is in service of somebody else’s voice, not a showcase for his own name.
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Alan Daniel Maman, born October 25, 1977, in Beverly Hills, California, has been working under the name the Alchemist since the early 1990s, when he started out as a rapper in the duo the Whooliganz before shifting toward production. By his own telling, he gravitated toward whatever felt rebellious and expressive as a kid, without any particular sense that music was the thing that would end up sticking. It did. He is widely regarded, now in his late forties, as one of the most influential producers in modern hip-hop and underground rap, known for a sample-heavy, texture-forward style that has anchored records for Mobb Deep, Eminem, Action Bronson, Freddie Gibbs, Roc Marciano, ScHoolboy Q, the Griselda camp, Boldy James, Earl Sweatshirt, and Curren$y, among many others, largely released through his own ALC Records.
The pattern of adapting to each collaborator rather than repeating himself runs through some of his longest-standing partnerships. His work with Mobb Deep’s Prodigy stretched across mixtapes including Return of the Mac and Albert Einstein, built around Prodigy’s dense, menacing street narratives. His ongoing Alfredo series with Freddie Gibbs takes a noticeably more luxury-coded, cinematic tone, and his Fetti album with Gibbs and Curren$y took yet another shape entirely. Larry June and 2 Chainz’s own prior collaboration with Alchemist, 2023’s The Great Escape, pulled in guests as varied as Big Sean, Wiz Khalifa, Ty Dolla Sign, and the veteran group Slum Village, all folded into Larry June’s laid-back register rather than any of their own. Complex itself named Alchemist its Best Hip-Hop Producer Alive for 2021, a title that, per his own account at the time, he accepted without any interest in holding it over his peers.
That range is, in a sense, the entire point of the answer he gave Complex. A producer with three decades of credits across that many different lyrical styles does not stay in demand by imposing one sound on everyone who walks into his studio. He stays in demand by treating every session as its own separate question: not what does Alchemist want to hear, but what gets this specific artist to pick up the pen.
