Questlove Confirms That a Posthumous D’Angelo Album Is Coming: ‘You’ll See Soon’

One of the unfathomable tricks D’Angelo pulled off on his beloved trio of studio albums was somehow sounding simultaneously like a lost R&B classic from the 1960s as well as a soul sonic space signal from some distant, funky future.

If you couldn’t get enough of that silky retro-futurism on Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000) or Black Messiah (2014), The Roots’ Questlove has some good news for you. Speaking to The National News Desk outlet on the red carpet at last weekend’s 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, the drummer, Oscar-winning documentarian and frequent D’Angelo collaborator teased that there’s more to come.

“You’ll see soon,” Quest said with a grin when asked if there were any unreleased tracks in the vault amid reports last year that the legendarily time-taking “Devil’s Pie” musician was slowly accumulating tracks for the long-awaited follow-up to the Grammy-winning Black Messiah. “It’s always the sound of yesterday, but for the future,” Quest added. “This record is no different.”

Though no additional information on the project was available at press time, in a 2024 chat with the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, collaborator Raphael Saadiq reported that the enigmatic singer was “in a good space” at that time. “I talk to him a couple times. He’s excited. We don’t talk much, but when we do talk it’s crazy, like, ‘Oh, you gotta hear this!’ He’s like, ‘You gotta play bass. I’ve got this track. I’m telling you, you got to get on it. It got your name all over it,’” Saadiq said.

He added that at that time D’Angelo was working on “six pieces right now and he seems super excited. He’s in control of his own destiny at this point. He has a management team, but they can’t make him do anything that he don’t wanna do. He knows it’s on him now and I think that’s a different angle that he’s coming from.”

Among the songs Saadiq said they were working on was an old track from their early days when they formed a short-lived group with A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip. “I think it’s going to be a record on D’Angelo’s new album when it comes out, a record that we all did together,” Saadiq said. “I’m playing bass, D’s playing, me and D is singing backgrounds. It’s funky as hell too. D is a bad boy. … It’s aged well. Good music ages well.”

As he was wont to do, D’Angelo went off-the-radar after releasing his last album more than a decade ago, popping up in 2018 to contribute the song “May I? Stand Unshaken” to the Red Dead Redemption 2 video game soundtrack. He also did a non-competition D’Angelo & Friends Verzuz set at the Apollo in 2021 that was pretty much a solo affair featuring collabs with Method Man & Redman, H.E.R. and The Vanguard backing band trumpet player Keyon Harrold.

D’angelo, who died on Oct. 14 following a battle with cancer, also teamed up with Jay-Z for “I Want You Forever” for the soundtrack to the movie The Book of Clarence.