Erykah Badu, The Alchemist – ‘Before The World Blows’ review: cosmic soul for a fractured world

Erykah Badu ’s first studio album in 16 years arrives after a cryptic, stop-start rollout, carrying a title fit for the final broadcast before civilisation loses signal.

Yet ‘Before the World Blows’, her long-awaited collaboration with venerated rap auteur The Alchemist , is less interested in predicting doomsday than asking what deserves protection when everything already feels volatile.

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The Alchemist’s dusty production and smoke-stained samples give these ideas a suitably unstable home, but Badu is no decorative voice laid over his beats.

She rearranges and programmes, adding Mellotron, kalimba and dense vocal stacks until singer and producer become indistinguishable.

Their friction makes both artists sound stranger, warmer and freer.

Badu bends language until wordplay becomes social critique.

On the murky ‘I Just Play A Part’, the singer’s claim that she’s merely performing a role keeps changing meaning, moving between seductress, observer and threat while Westside Gunn’s distinctive “doot-doot-doot” ad-libs surround the track. ‘Witch Doctor’ is even sharper: her leap from witchcraft to “a medium like the media” turns a supernatural joke into an argument about propaganda and manufactured belief.

The record hits hardest when those large anxieties enter intimate spaces. ‘Crossfade’ follows a woman returning a ring rather than settling.

The gorgeous ‘To The Moon (Plan C)’ moves from an arcade date and teenage curfews to quiet panic over a late period; Steve Lacy’s reply avoids soap opera fireworks, and that restraint makes the unplanned future startlingly real. ‘Next 2 U’ provides perhaps the album’s most revealing act of reclamation.

It reworks Alchemist’s beat for Mobb Deep ’s 1999 song ‘The Realest’, which Badu had long wanted to sing and rap over, eventually leading to the collaborators’ introduction.

Queensbridge menace becomes an after-school crush mantra about smoking blunts and breaking rules ( “I can’t even fly / You’re the only one that gets me high” ).

Badu doesn’t soften Uncle Al’s past classic so much as expose the longing concealed inside it.

Elsewhere, Badu pits wealth against poverty, and peace against war over Thundercat ’s patient bass on ‘They Ain’t You’.