Erykah Badu & The Alchemist — Before The World Blows

Sixteen years, and the record that ends them is loose on purpose. Badu and Alchemist met at her Birthday Bash in Dallas, cut the album over eighteen months between Dallas and Los Angeles, and road-tested it in phone-free rooms before anyone heard a finished version. It landed August 28 on her own Control FREAQ with Young: an hour and two minutes, sixteen songs and a spoken outro, with Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Earl Sweatshirt, Kamasi Washington, Joi and two Westside Gunn verses. "Next 2 U" rebuilds Alchemist's beat for Mobb Deep's "The Realest" into a smoking-blunts crush song, which tells you the method: take the hardest thing in his catalog and find the longing inside it. It sprawls. "Abracadabra" stops before it develops, and the album would survive losing three tracks. The room is not wrong to be loud here, but it is louder about the return than about the hour.