Erykah Badu and The Alchemist Built Their Album Over 18 Months

Erykah Badu and The Alchemist released Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment on 28 August. It is Badu’s first full-length project since the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone. The new record was co-produced over 18 months in Dallas and Los Angeles. Much of it had already left the studio before release day.

The Alchemist sent Badu a set of instrumental beats. She took them apart and rebuilt them with kalimba, chords and drums instead of simply adding a vocal to a finished bed. “His compositions are like classical music to me - how he layers chimes and voices and strings and horns,” Badu told the Guardian. Their shared production credit describes the arrangement more accurately than the familiar singer-and-beatmaker shorthand.

During 2024 and 2025, the pair played the unreleased album in small, phone-free rooms with Badu’s collective the Cannabinoids and The Alchemist working the MPC. The stage became another production room. The tracks could still change in front of an audience, without a forest of screens preserving each draft.

Badu gives the long interval between projects a practical explanation: “Procrastinating and living, learning and stuff - that gives you stuff to write about.” She gathers until there is enough to turn back into music. On that timetable, the album’s arrival was not a sudden comeback but the final public step in a process already heard in rooms. Witch Doctor had a stage life before it became track four.