It’s arguably DMX’s most complete and complex work, even if it’s not loaded with stream-racking bangers. Instead, the sound moves from warmly melodic to icily atonal to soulfully jazzy.
(His death closely followed those of two other middle-aged rappers, MF Doom and Black Rob, and shortly preceded that of Digital Underground’s Shock G - an unhappy way to realize that hip-hop itself has been around for nearly half a century.Without reading too much into any of the above, “Exodus” is a grand yet unusually subtle finale from a raw-nerved rapper and angry, vulnerable lyricist with a lot on his mind.Įven though DMX and Swizz had a history reaching back nearly a quarter century, “Exodus” - named after one of X’s sons - is not a retread: In no way does it sound as if it belongs in the year 2000. 1 albums - including two in a single year - in the late ’90s and early ’00s.ĭMX, who’d signed a new deal with the Def Jam label that helped turn him into a star, had the LP virtually finished when he died from a heart attack reportedly related to a drug overdose. The producer says that he and DMX got to work on “Exodus” in the immediate wake of the rapper’s well-received July 2020 Verzuz battle with Snoop Dogg, which reinvigorated his career after some time in the wilderness the idea was a kind of focused, high-level reintroduction of an artist whose fierce lyricism and unvarnished charisma led to a string of five No. Indeed, according to Swizz Beatz, who worked with DMX for years in the studio and oversaw the making of “Exodus,” this impressive 13-track set wasn’t intended to be a posthumous album at all.
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Released Thursday night, “Exodus” joins a tragic cavalcade of recent projects from hip-hop artists who died before their time, including 20-year-old Pop Smoke and 21-year-old Juice Wrld, both of whose 2020 LPs were among last year’s most commercially successful in any genre, as well as XXXTentacion (20), Mac Miller (26) and Lil Peep (21).īut DMX’s album also stands apart, not least because of his age - “Exodus” has a distinctly grown-up quality, with thoughts of nostalgia and fatherhood - and because he was part of a generation from before the era when digital recording enabled musicians to create vast stores of material that their survivors could later comb through. One unsettling sign of how big the business for posthumous hip-hop albums has become: DMX’s “Exodus,” which arrives just weeks after the gravel-voiced rapper’s death on April 9 at age 50, does so minus a planned appearance by the late Pop Smoke - because, DMX’s producer says, the verse in question ended up on one of Pop Smoke’s posthumous records first.