Erykah Badu and The Alchemist Set ‘Abi & Alan’ Album for August 28

There is something fitting about Erykah Badu and The Alchemist naming an album after themselves, not the names we know from marquees and record sleeves but the ones closer to home. Abi & Alan. A middle and a first name meeting somewhere between the dust of a drum break and the smoke of Badu’s voice. After more than a year of rumors, loose singles, surprise performances and an album that seemed to exist just beyond reach, Erykah Badu and The Alchemist have officially announced Abi & Alan, their collaborative album arriving August 28, 2026. With the announcement comes “Witch Doctor,” another glimpse into the strange, warm little universe the two have been quietly building.

For Badu, the arrival carries particular weight. Abi & Alan will be her first studio album since 2010’s New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh). Sixteen years is enough time for an album to become a landmark, for listeners to grow older beside it, for the absence of another to begin feeling almost intentional. Badu, though, has never seemed especially concerned with the clock. Her music arrives when it has somewhere to go. And The Alchemist understands this kind of patience. He has spent decades making beats that sound excavated rather than constructed, drums coated in fingerprints, samples that flicker like old film, loops spacious enough for a rapper or singer to wander around inside them. On Abi & Alan, he handles the production in full, placing Badu’s unmistakable voice inside a world built entirely from his own musical architecture.

Even the title strips away some of the mythology. Beneath Badu and The Alchemist, the icon and the revered producer, there are simply Abi and Alan, making records together. We first began hearing what that might sound like in 2025 with Next To You. More of the album slowly emerged during the pair’s Abi & Alan Luv Is Tour, turning concerts into something closer to listening rooms for a record that hadn’t yet arrived. An August 2025 release was initially expected before the project was delayed, leaving the music suspended for another year.

Now comes Witch Doctor.

The title itself feels almost inevitable in Badu’s hands. Her catalog has always been interested in music as something beyond entertainment; medicine, ritual, memory, repetition. Paired with The Alchemist, a producer whose very name suggests the transformation of ordinary material into something precious, the collaboration begins to feel less like an unlikely pairing and more like two artists discovering they have been speaking neighboring dialects all along. Perhaps that is what makes Abi & Alan so intriguing. It isn’t simply the return of Erykah Badu after sixteen years without a studio album. It’s the possibility of hearing what happens when two artists who have spent their careers refusing urgency finally decide the moment is right.

For those who have been close enough to watch Abi & Alan take shape, the anticipation has been building well beyond what Badu and The Alchemist have allowed the public to hear. A&R executive Kay K Rosemond, who has worked with the pair behind the scenes during the album’s development, tells R&B Garden that Witch Doctor only begins to reveal what they have assembled.

“This is an album I’ve been waiting on for a long time, especially being such a huge fan of both Erykah and The Alchemist,” Rosemond says. “It’s been an absolute pleasure helping them along in this process behind the scenes.

And while Witch Doctor may be the song opening the door right now, Rosemond already has another favorite, offering one of the first hints at another song from the album.

“Witch Doctor is excellent but my personal favorite off the project right now is No ID, there’s a crazy lineup of featured artists on here that I don’t want to spoil just yet but when the album drops, I think people are going to be pleasantly surprised.”

That little bit of secrecy feels appropriate for an album that has spent much of its existence revealing itself slowly. Badu and The Alchemist have allowed Abi & Alan to arrive in fragments, a song here, a performance there, enough information to know something is growing without being permitted to see the entire garden, and Rosemond puts it more simply: “Enjoy, and welcome back to real R&B and good music.”

So after all this waiting, August 28 is suddenly very close and somewhere between Abi and Alan, between soul and sample, between the record we have imagined and the one we’re finally about to hear, something has been brewing. Witch Doctor is our latest invitation inside. Listen and purchase here.