Wednesday night in downtown Dallas, Erykah Badu put the new record on vinyl at Shyboy Hi-Fi and let the room sit with it. Sixteen tracks. Incense. A crate. No phone in the hand if the night was doing its job. Friday, Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment went out — her first album since New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh) in 2010, and the first full-length since the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone.
The Alchemist is on the spine with her. That is not a feature credit. They built it together over eighteen months in Dallas and Los Angeles, after a year of delays that had the street date sitting on 2025 and then moving to August 28, 2026. She told Apple Music he sent beats and she sat on them. “I don’t know how I know the time was right, but the music really motivated me.” The title came the way a lot of titles come now: the scroll. Weather, succession, the next thing that is supposed to end the week. “Maybe we need to finish this album before the world blows.”
Not a beat tape with a famous singer on it
People who only know Alchemist from the last decade of grimy rap — Earl Sweatshirt, Westside Gunn, the rooms that treat a drum loop like scripture — will hear those names here. Both of them are on the record. So are DRAM, Joi, Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington. The mistake is treating that guest list as the story. Badu has been clear this is not him producing her from another zip code. She picked, arranged, programmed, and brought in her own players. Control Freaq, under license to Young. An equal name on the cover.
“Before I met Al, I was kind of hardening up,” she told Apple Music. “Al kind of helps me to lighten up and remember why I am doing what I am doing. You’re not doing it for your moment, you’re not doing it to win anything, you’re doing it because you love what you do.” He said the work taught him to slow the brash part down. That is the chemistry the title is pointing at. Abi and Alan. Not a brand collaboration. Two people who still think a record is supposed to take time.
Dallas first
Badu is not a Texas tourist. She is from here, and she has said so in the language of blood: generations of Dallas, the smell of the city, a nervous system that works better at home. Playing the album downtown two days before the street date is the same instinct as the analog week this desk keeps writing about. A stream will give you the tracks. A listening room with a turntable will make you stay for the middle. Echos opens at seven minutes. Witch Doctor and Next 2 U were already out as singles. The album still asks for the whole hour.
That is what “purity” actually means on this record, if the word is going to be used at all. Not a museum of 1997. Not a lecture about how rap used to be. A demand that the listener do the old work: sit still, let the bass finish a sentence, let a horn from Kamasi Washington close the night on Black Box without skipping to the next thing. Crossfade and Love Me Not will be the ones people send. I Know That Man, with Earl, is the one that sits after. No score out of ten. If a track is leftovers, say so after a second listen. This one is not leftovers.
The afters were the city
After the playback she stayed and DJed as Lo Down Loretta Brown with DJ Sober — the public half of the night. Beyoncé and André 3000’s Party. Webbie’s Independent. Her own Bag Lady, with the room singing it back. Thundercat came out for Them Changes. That is Dallas doing what Dallas does when the person the city claims actually comes home: the private listen, then the booth, then the song everybody already knew.
The North American run with De La Soul starts September 10 outside Chicago and is booked through the end of the month in Southern California. As of this week, a Texas date has not been announced. The record does not need a Moody Center hold to be in rotation here. It already had a downtown room, a crate, and a city that did not have to be explained to the woman who made it. One more Badu album before the world blows. Dallas heard it first. The rest of us can catch the hour now.
