Sixteen years is a long silence. Erykah Badu has not released a studio album since 2010's New Amerykah Part Two, and the wait, punctuated by a 2015 mixtape and scattered one-offs, has felt less like a hiatus and more like a holding pattern. On August 28, that pattern breaks.
The project still has no official title. A Bandcamp listing carries the placeholder "Sorry, we don't have an album title yet...", and though The Alchemist previously referred to it as Abi & Alan, a nod to Badu's middle name (Erica Abi Wright) and his own first name (Alan Maman), current release materials sidestep the question entirely. What is confirmed: 17 tracks, most untitled, that move through soul, blues, funk, rock, jazz and underground hip-hop without settling in any one of them.
The first signal came in June 2025 with "Next to You," a warm, understated track that felt like two artists finding a shared vocabulary in real time. A second preview, "Echos 19 (mix 122)," arrived as an Amazon Music exclusive tied to Badu's Juneteenth concert in Dallas. Then came "Witch Doctor" last week, a 10-minute visual directed by Badu herself that doubles as a spiritual sequel to her controversial 2010 "Window Seat" video.
The record's origins trace back to a chance comment. Badu told a creative partner she had always wanted to rap over Mobb Deep's "The Realest," an Alchemist production. The message reached him, sessions followed in Los Angeles and Dallas, and over 18 months the beats were broken down and rebuilt. Alchemist sent instrumentals. Badu deconstructed them, adding kalimba, chords, percussion, and her own samples until each track carried the unmistakable print of both makers.
From 2024 to 2025, the pair road-tested the material live in phone-free settings with Badu's digital collective The Cannabinoids and Alchemist on the MPC, refining the songs in front of audiences who were asked to leave their devices at the door.
For The Alchemist, the record arrives during one of the most prolific stretches of his career. His Alfredo 2 with Freddie Gibbs, the follow-up to their Grammy-nominated 2020 original, dropped earlier this year. For Badu, the stakes are different. She has spent the intervening years touring, teaching, working as a doula, and raising children. The record that emerges from that decade and a half is not a comeback statement but something more interesting: a document of what happens when a singular voice meets a producer willing to build an entire architecture around it.
The pair will tour North America together through September, starting at Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois on September 10 and closing at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on September 29. Dates span Toronto, Cleveland, Denver, New York and Washington D.C., among others. Tickets are available through erykahbadu.com.