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What last ideas will dance around your brain when it all ends? I like to believe I’ll be considering something profound, like the meaning of life or the exquisite love I share with the people I care about most. But more than likely, I’ll probably just be thinking about the last person who made me blush, the last bastard who had me fucked up, or how I’m finally going to kick my Instagram addiction. Before the World Blows, the end-of-days collaborative album between Erykah Badu and the Alchemist, is concerned with everyday thoughts placed side by side with big picture ideas—like the harmful effects of digital media and the way men treat women in a patriarchal world. Rapping, singing, producing, and arranging alongside the Alchemist’s nocturnal boom-bap, Badu hopes for the album to exist as a capsule to pass down to her two daughters, Puma, 22, and Mars, 17.
Before the World Blows was slow to arrive. Last June, Badu and the Alchemist toured the album before its planned release date in August 2025; just a day before it was due out, the album was pushed back indefinitely. It was completely finished, but in Badu’s mind, it wasn’t ready for the world yet. You can imagine how fans, who had been waiting 10 years for Badu’s first full-length since 2015’s self-proclaimed Trap & B mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone, reacted. But to be an Erykah Badu fan is an exercise in patience; you can safely trust that whatever you finally get will be worth the wait. Together, Badu and the Alchemist are a well-oiled machine, Badu’s off-the-cuff musing idling atop the blunted beats like a cozy breeze.
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The album takes Badu back to her roots as a young rapper in Dallas, admiring the rough-edged hip-hop movement in New York. In the ’90s, she performed as Erykah Free with her cousin Robert before splintering off into a solo act with her momentous 1997 debut, Baduizm. During that decade, the Alchemist was one of New York’s hardest-working producers in the underground hip-hop scene, making his mark with game-changing beats for Mobb Deep and Dilated Peoples. Badu’s vocals on Before the World Blows are exploratory and relaxed, harkening back to those years, as she loosely raps about trifling players, booty calls, and hickies.
Sometimes, this comes off slightly rambly—only Badu can get away with a polemic like “Black Box,” which compares cell phones to “crack rocks” with lines like “Too much dopamine can make a man mean,” or a song like “Witch Doctor,” which likens the media to a medium. In such moments, Badu and the Alchemist’s co-production, featuring some of his best work in years, still reels you back in, shrouding whatever car, living room, or bedroom you’re in with sedate and haunting beats peppered with mystical Badu motifs—luminous chimes, zaps meant to launch you into a higher state of consciousness.
Even the toughest instrumentals the Alchemist and Badu reimagine for a seductive suite in the sky. “Next 2 U”’s production will sound familiar to Mobb Deep fans, because it’s taken from 1999’s gritty underground anthem “The Realest.” Flipping the OG’s story of street politics, Badu glides across the iconic electric bass riff with a little freaky Auto-Tune, singing about the great pleasure of sharing a blunt and a shot of something warm with someone you have googly eyes for. The duo plays off each other’s humor on “Love Me Not,” a sparkling slow groove about getting waxed for a noncommittal lover with a skit that places us right in the waxing room with her while a drumbeat as viscid as the syrupy hair removal formula fades out. In an album of 16 tracks, attention begins to waver in an awkwardly bright middle section, starting with the saccharine piano chords of “Breezy” and closing with the uplifting recess jam “To the Moon”—a brown patch in a misty garden of chilled tracks.
Aside from having excellent back catalogs, what Erykah Badu and the Alchemist have in common is their curiosity. The two are unafraid to work with younger artists, holding them in esteem as their equals. Although he is one of their blueprints, Alchemist has been a longtime supporter of the millennial rappers that feature on the album, Earl Sweatshirt and Westside Gunn, and as rap has grown increasingly free-form since hip-hop and R&B were colliding in neo-soul’s halcyon days, Badu has taken herself less seriously, too. There’s nothing as earwormy on Before the World Blows as when Badu first sang the hook on 1997’s “Rim Shot,” but on “Hot Bibi,” she reaches for something close, if not more confusing. Badu chops bursts of flute samples into a euphoric rhythm as she asks, voice high as if she had been sucking on a balloon, “What’s the ishy/Toilet tishy?” Bigger thoughts have been had, but if it sounds this groovy right before we all see black, I wouldn’t be mad.
Correction: An earlier version of this review inaccurately attributed the production credits on several songs; the review has been updated.
