Erykah Badu and the Alchemist have confirmed a Badu Alchemist album release date of 28 August, with the untitled collaborative record arriving digitally via Control FREAQ Records/Young Recordings. The announcement came alongside a new single, ‘Witch Doctor’.
Sixteen years is a long time between studio albums. Long enough for trends to calcify and dissolve, for entire sub-genres to rise and vanish, for the music that once surrounded a voice to date itself badly. The fact that this record exists at all, and that it arrives sounding like nothing the calendar demands, is itself worth pausing over.
How the Badu Alchemist album release came together
The project’s origins are unexpectedly intimate. Badu told longtime creative partner Cold Cris that she wanted to rap over Mobb Deep’s ‘The Realest’, itself an Alchemist production. That stated desire led to an introduction, and the Alchemist, who had apparently been hoping to work with Badu for years, travelled to a Los Angeles studio session that produced early track ‘Next to You’ and set the wider collaboration in motion.
What followed was 18 months of recording across Dallas and Los Angeles. Badu’s approach was deconstructive: she took a collection of Alchemist instrumentals and reshaped them, adding kalimba, layered chords and drums to his warm, sample-driven productions. The result is a record that sits at an unusual intersection, Badu’s jazz-and-soul instincts pressing against the producer’s characteristically dense, punchy textures.
Two singles preceded the announcement. ‘Next to You’ arrived earlier, and ‘Echos 19 (mix 122)’ debuted as an Amazon Music exclusive during Badu’s Badu Presents: Echos 19 Juneteenth celebration in Dallas. ‘Witch Doctor’ is the latest, released alongside the album announcement.
Road-testing the material in phone-free rooms
Perhaps the most unusual element of the process was what happened before any of it was committed to record. Throughout 2024 and 2025, the pair road-tested the material live in intimate, phone-free settings, performing with Badu’s digital collective, the Cannabinoids, while the Alchemist worked the MPC. The live circuit functioned less as promotion and more as a workshop: each performance allowed them to fine-tune arrangements and gauge how the songs moved in a room before finalising anything.
It is a methodology more associated with theatre than contemporary music-making, and it shows a particular kind of patience from both parties. The Alchemist, in particular, has spent recent years releasing at a speed that suggests urgency above all else. In 2025 alone, he released Alfredo 2 with Freddie Gibbs, the follow-up to their Grammy-nominated 2020 album Alfredo, alongside albums with Hit-Boy and the trio of Armand Hammer, Billy Woods and ELUCID. Working slowly, in service of someone else’s creative timeline, represents a different mode entirely.
For Badu, the record ends what the report describes as 11 years without a new release and 16 years since her last official studio album. That gap has not been empty, she has toured, taught, raised children and worked as a doula, alongside what the announcement describes as plenty of existential reflection. The absence was chosen rather than enforced, and the collaboration with the Alchemist appears to have been the specific catalyst that brought her back to record.
Live dates ahead of the album dropping
The road work continues after the release. Badu and the Alchemist are scheduled to perform on 10 September at Ravinia outside Chicago, before wrapping their live commitments on 29 September at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Given the phone-free, workshop nature of their earlier shows, those two larger-venue dates will be worth watching to see how the material scales.
The untitled album arrives digitally on 28 August.
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