Black Star announce first album in 24 years

Talib Kweli and yasiin bey have announced their long-awaited second joint album as Black Star. No Fear of Time will be available to stream exclusively on the Luminary podcasting platform starting May 3, nearly 24 years after the release of their cult-favorite collaborative debut, Most Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star. The full project is produced by Madlib.

Kweli and bey have teased Black Star reunions multiple times in recent years — according to Kweli, their attempts to reform were previously thwarted by "interlopers and culture vultures" — but today's news is the most concrete evidence we've seen so far that new music is on the way.

“About 3-4 years ago I was visiting yasiin in Europe and we started to talk about songs to do on an album, so I flew an engineer out just to see what that would be," Kweli writes in No Fear of Time's press release. "Once I realized this conversation is starting to organically become a creative conversation, I started making sure to have the engineer around at all times. There was one day we were just in a hotel listening to Madlib beats, and he’s like ‘Play that Madlib tape again.’ I’m playing the beats and he starts doing rhymes to the beats. And that’s how we did the first song. This is very similar to how we did the first album. But the first album, there were no mobile studios. This entire album, we have not set foot in one recording studio. It’s all been done in hotel rooms and backstage at Dave Chappelle shows.”

Watch a brief preview of the album below.