Erykah Badu and The Alchemist release their highly anticipated joint album Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment. The co-produced album was recorded over 18 months in Dallas and Los Angeles, and is one of the most forward-thinking bodies of work of either artist’s career: a record that will live, love, and evolve with you through space and time. It invites you to keep exploring yourself, to have one more kiss, one more hit, one more dance, one more joke – all before the world blows. Out now via Control FREAQ Records / Young Recordings.
Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment exists in the tension between introspection and growth. Abi is Badu. Alan is The Alchemist. The record finds Badu contemplating which parts of ourselves and our stories – love, innocence, dreams, memories, womanhood – are worth protecting before the world breaks and fragments. Meditative and fluid, the album unfolds in four movements, charting the progression of self through the prisms of love, art, and identity, inviting us to sit with difficult feelings. Passion blurs with desire, hope with grief, each song revealing another illuminating facet of the inner Baduverse.
The rollout started with a series of cryptic posters appearing across Sydney, Melbourne, London, Paris, and New York City bearing the phrase ‘One More Song…’, accompanied by a code inviting fans to www.b-t-w-b.com to decipher a series of clues that revealed the album’s title: Before the World Blows. Then came the release of ‘Witch Doctor‘, with it’s Badu-directed music video premiering via a special one-off screening alongside an iconic prequel: the 2010 ‘Window Seat‘. This week, Erykah Badu opened Badu Burner Phone, inviting fans to complete an interactive challenge to unlock the Badu Burner Phone number. Callers who provide the decoded album title as a passphrase got a chance to connect with Erykah Badu via FaceTime or video call, where select participants were be asked to complete the phrase ‘One Mo ______ Before the World Blows‘ inspired by the album’s poem BTWB.
The Abi and Alan Experiment began more than three years ago after Badu told her longtime creative partner Cold Cris that she had always wanted to rap over Mobb Deep’s ‘The Realest,’ a gritty, pounding Alchemist production. The Alchemist – who had quietly been hoping to work with Badu for years – was introduced soon after, and their conversations grew into a full-fledged collaborative project. The duo’s first studio session together in Los Angeles yielded the previously released ‘Next to You‘, laying the foundation for what would become an entirely new sonic language. The Alchemist sent Erykah Badu a collection of instrumental beats, which she deconstructed and sculpted into tracks that felt uniquely hers, embellishing his warm, punchy samples with instruments from soft kalimba notes to immersive chords and drums. From 2024 to 2025, Abi and Alan road-tested the entire album live, performing in intimate, phone-free settings with Badu’s digital collective, The Cannabinoids, and The Alchemist on the MPC, fine-tuning the tracks along the way. The result is the inevitable collision of two iconoclasts: hypnotic, funny, blunt, deeply personal, and impossible to categorise neatly.
In the eleven years since her last project and sixteen since her last official studio album, Erykah Badu has gathered not conclusions but a series of existential insights via a whirlwind of touring, teaching, motherhood, doula work, and the kind of deep reflection made possible by living and raising children in a rapidly changing world. Her cultural influence has only expanded in that time; a five-time GRAMMY winner with 20 nominations, Badu graced the cover of Vogue in 2023, received the CFDA Fashion Icon Award in 2024 and Billboard’s Icon Award in 2025, while continuing to collaborate across generations with artists including Janelle Monáe, Tyler, the Creator, Flying Lotus, Robert Glasper, Teyana Taylor and Rapsody. Meanwhile, The Alchemist has remained one of hip-hop’s most prolific producers, releasing multiple projects a year, from Spiral Staircases to Life Is Beautiful, LIQUID FORM to Bread and most recently Alfredo 2 with Freddie Gibbs, the sequel to their Grammy-nominated 2020 album Alfredo.
Erykah Badu & The Alchemist – Witch Doctor
Erykah Badu and The Alchemist
Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment
1. Echos
2. I Just Play A Part
3. Crossfade (feat. DJ Creole Princess, Westside Gunn, Joi)
4. Witch Doctor
5. Valentine (feat. DRAM)
6. Next 2 U
7. Love Me Not
8. Breezy
9. Abracadabra
10. To The Moon (Plan C) (feat. Steve Lacy)
11. They Ain’t You (feat. Thundercat)
12. What The People Say (Apostle 1)
13. Hot BiBi (Apostle 2)
14. No I.D. (feat. Westside Gunn)
15. I Know That Man (feat. Earl Sweatshirt)
16. Black Box (feat. Kamasi Washington)
Erykah Badu
Website | Instagram | TikTok |
