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Jill Scott Comes Back Home: To Whom This May Concern

Eleven years after Woman, the Philly poet returns on her own label with a 19-track album, a Hip-Hop guest list and a soul that hasn’t aged out of the room.

Jill Scott - To Who'm This May Concern - typographic graphic in red

19 tracks. More than a decade later since Woman

No. 4 Top R&B Albums debut.

When Jill Scott announced a new album on January 2, 2026, it was her first in more than a decade, following 2015’s Woman. The title, To Whom This May Concern, reads like a letter. She said the name itself brought her peace, as Billboard reported, and that this one is for the people it’s for. PhillyVoice reported the same.


The break was not a block. She told Billboard she simply took a creative break. The album came together over roughly the last eighteen months, and it runs 19 tracks, all of them new. It arrived independently through her own Blues Babe imprint, distributed via Human Re Sources/The Orchard, and it landed on February 13, just in time for Valentine’s Day, as Soulbounce noted. More than ten years of quiet, then 19 tracks at once.


The sound. The lead single “Beautiful People,” produced by Om’Mas Keith, opens with Jill talking to her mother, Joyce Alice, before the groove comes in. Soulbounce hears ’70s soul, modern R&B and jazz in it, built on rhythm guitar, bass, keys, drums and congas. The press release, as twntythree ran it, frames the whole project around connectivity, humanity and collective home, and says it stretches as far as spoken word and even house. The Arts Desk heard improvisational spirit in it, and the room feels lived-in rather than polished flat.


The Hip-Hop paragraph. Jill has always kept one foot in the culture, and this guest list shows it. Ab-Soul, J.I.D., Tierra Whack and Too $hort are all featured, Okayplayer reported, with production from Adam Blackstone, Om’Mas Keith, DJ Premier, Camper, Andre Harris, Trombone Shorty and others. At the 2024 Roots Picnic she brought out Tierra Whack to debut a song together, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, and Whack is on the album. Fellow Philadelphian, same streets.


The cover. The artwork is a painting by Chicago artist Marcellous Lovelace of a Black woman carrying affirmations like “We can save ourselves,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. It tells you the album is an offering and a warning in the same breath.

The reception. AceShowbiz reported that the album debuted in the top 10 on seven Billboard charts dated February 28, including No. 4 on Top R&B Albums and No. 7 on Top Album Sales. Not bad for a record released without a major label behind it.


Where to start. “Beautiful People” for the mood, “Pressha” (her latest Top 10 R&B radio hit, per the press release) and “Right Here, Right Now” for the range, and the Tierra Whack feature for the Philly connection. Then let the album run front to back. It’s also out on CD and gold vinyl, if you like to hold your music.


Sounds



Sources & Further Reading

  1. Okayplayer – Album announcement and features
  2. Soul Bounce – Lead single and release date
  3. Philadelphia Inquirer – Album announcement and cover art
  4. The FADER – Features and tracklist
  5. Billboard Canada – Release and label details
  6. ABC Audio – Interview quotes on the break
  7. AceShowbiz – Chart debut
  8. PhillyVoice - Salute norf side


Official Artist Links


No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.




A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.

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Erykah Badu & The Alchemist: Before the World Blows

Eleven years apart, one shared beat, and a phone-free room in Toronto

erykah bady and the alchemist typographic graphic in pink and gold

Erykah Badu and The Alchemist's joint album

Before the World Blows started with a Mobb Deep beat and became her first LP in over a decade.



It started with a beat Erykah Badu couldn't let go of. Riding around with her friend Cole Chris, she kept coming back to "The Realest," the 1999 Mobb Deep track built on an Alchemist beat, singing over it like it was already hers. Chris turned out to know Alchemist and made the introduction. Three years and 18 months of studio time between Dallas and Los Angeles later, that car-ride impulse became Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment, released August 28, 2026 — Badu's first album since 2010's New Amerykah, Pt. 2 (not counting the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone), and her first as a fully independent artist on her own label, distributed through Young/Beggars Group.


Most of the record was built in the same room. The two of them traded off between Badu's studio and Alchemist's, rarely apart for the length of the sessions. The project's working name, "Abi and Al," comes from Badu's own middle name — a small but deliberate move, she's said, to let listeners step outside "the 30-year Erica Badu program" and meet something newer, less armored. "Before I met Al, I was kind of hardening up," she's said of the years leading into this collaboration — worn down by an industry culture that chases "a moment"; working with him helped her lighten back up and remember why she makes music at all.


Even the title has a backstory: it began as a poem, built out of a running refrain — one more blunt, one more glass of water, one more shot, before the world blows — half doomscrolling anxiety about the state of things, half an inside joke about how long the album itself was taking to land.

They road-tested it live before anyone outside the room had heard a note. In August 2025, Badu and Alchemist played the entire album at Toronto's History with backing collective The Cannabinoids — a phone-free show, no recording, no leaks, just the songs doing the introducing.


The credits read like a map of who's been paying attention to both of them for decades: Westside Gunn (twice), Earl Sweatshirt, Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, DRAM, and Badu's fellow neo-soul-era traveler Joi. A few of those pairings have their own small stories — the "To the Moon" beat sat with Jay Electronica for three years before Alchemist finally got it to Badu, and DRAM reportedly wrote full songs to five different Alchemist beats off voice notes on a tour bus before Badu called time. Even Badu's 17-year-old daughter, who records as Mars Electronica, wrote the chorus melody on "Love Me Not." As Stereogum put it, Badu raps nearly as much as she sings across the record, in a loose, whispery style that blurs the two.


The rollout matched the record's spirit — cryptic "One More Song…" posters across five cities, a puzzle-based reveal of the title, an interactive "Badu Burner Phone" experience where fans who crack the code get a real callback. Playful, a little conspiratorial, entirely on brand for an artist who's never done a press cycle the normal way.


Sounds



Sources & Further Reading


Official Artist Links


No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.



A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.

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Jane Handcock Made a Weed Anthem in 2021 — And It's Still a Stoners Banger

Before "Stingy" introduced her to a wider audience, the First Lady of Death Row Records dropped a one-of-a-kind ode to getting high. Four years later, the message still holds up.

Jane Handcock


First Lady

That's Jane Handcock's title at Death Row Records — Snoop Dogg's own label, reborn under his ownership. In 2021, she used that platform to drop "Like My Weed," a song that's less a party anthem than a quiet argument for slowing down.

In 2021, Snoop Dogg handed the mic to Jane Handcock for a compilation called Snoop Dogg Presents: The Algorithm — his mission-statement album about putting feeling back into music. Buried in the tracklist was "Like My Weed," a song that never chased a chart position and didn't need to. It's stayed in rotation for anyone who found it since, and it holds up in a way a lot of 2021 rap didn't.


The song is simple on its face: Handcock likes her weed in the morning, and she says so, repeatedly, unapologetically. But the writing is where it earns its keep. She raps about being so high she left her wallet and lighter behind in El Segundo, and she tips her hat to A Tribe Called Quest's very first single along the way — a small detail that signals she knows exactly where she sits in hip-hop's lineage, even on a song this loose.


That lineage matters more than it might seem. Handcock isn't just a Death Row artist — she's a ghostwriter with credits across the industry, having written for names like Kelly Rowland, Rick Ross, Teddy Riley, and Tyrese, alongside her own catalog of overlooked gems. "Like My Weed" is one of the rare Handcock songs where she's fully in the frame, voice and personality both, rather than working in service of someone else's.


It's also a song that's aged into relevance rather than out of it. Cannabis culture in 2021 was already mainstream, but the specific image "Like My Weed" traffics in — a Black woman openly, casually enjoying weed as self-care rather than rebellion — still isn't a message pop culture makes room for often enough. The war on drugs didn't affect everyone equally, and the normalization era hasn't fully caught up with who gets to be casual about getting high on record. Handcock's version of that casualness is worth holding onto.


Four years on, "Stingy" is the song most people found her through. But "Like My Weed" is the one that shows her range — an artist who can write velvety soul confessionals and a stoner anthem with equal command, and make both sound completely her own.

Sounds



Sources & Further Reading


  1. uDiscover Music — "Snoop Dogg Presents Jane Handcock And Her New Single, 'Like My Weed'" — https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/snoo-dogg-the-algorithm-jane-handcock-like-my-weed/
  2. West Coast Styles — "Jane Handcock Drops Official Video For 'Like My Weed'" — https://westcoaststyles.com/news/2021/11/jane-handcock-drops-official-video-for-like-my-weed/
  3. Apple Music — "Like My Weed" — https://music.apple.com/us/song/like-my-weed/1599378498
  4. Pot TV — "Jane Handcock – Like My Weed" — https://pot.tv/video/2021/12/22/jane-handcock-like-my-weed/
  5. YouTube (Official Video) — "Jane Handcock – Like My Weed (Official Video)" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2I1X4o7m0g


Official Artist Links


No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.


Jane Handcock @ Deathrow records - deathrowrecords.com/jane-handcock


A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.