De La Soul have announced they’re working on the final installment of their Art Official Intelligence series, 22 years after the last volume dropped.
During a visit to the Kyle Meredith With… podcast on Thursday (April 6), group member Maseo teased that a third AOI LP was in the works.
Maseo also confirmed to the podcast host that many of the vocals were recorded prior to the untimely death of Trugoy the Dove, but that fans would be able to enjoy new music as well.
“AOI 3 is definitely going to take precedent,” he said. “It’s going to be the very next thing. That’s a responsibility that we have to our fans — a responsibility we even have to ourselves — with completing that trilogy.
“We have a responsibility to continue on just to sustain [Trugoy’s] legacy and what we’ve built as three childhood friends, and we have a responsibility to Hip Hop.”
But Maseo also assured fans that they wouldn’t be getting a retread of the collective’s older material. “A lot of stuff is fresh,” he said. “There’s a couple of ideas I had been sitting on for a while. Nothing had lyrics on it.
“The stuff that had lyrics on it, we already kind of leaked it. That was ‘The Return of DST,’ the Chuck D record, ‘The People.’ The other one that we leaked was [‘Get Away,’], we used the Wu-Tang sample.”
Check out Maseo’s chat with Kyle Meredith below:
The last time De La Soul fans had an AOI installment was all the way back in 2001 when the legendary trio dropped AOI: Bionix, the second album of the trilogy. At the time, HipHopDX — which gave the album 4.5 out of 5 stars — remarked that the album was soulful and replete with sounds coming from the old school while pondering the then-upcoming release of AOI 3 in 2002.
AOI: Bionix was also the last album to be released on Tommy Boy Records before the label became defunct in 2002.
De La Soul then fought a protracted legal battle with their former label — and it was a battle that seemed hopeless until 2021 when Reservoir Media acquired its discography as part of its $100million acquisition of Tommy Boy in 2021.
Reservoir Media subsequently distributed De La Soul’s catalog via Chrysalis Records. As a result, the collective’s iconic tracks became available on all streaming platforms as of March 2023.
Just one week after the catalog became available, Billboard confirmed it registered 12.5 million official on-demand U.S. song streams in the week ending March 9 and sold 28,000 albums (both digital download and physical copies combined).
wonder if it will still be “ok some dj shit”. IYKYK.
ON – gottam autocorrect
Dope! Lots of parallels to Tribe’s final LP. Some contributions by one member before passing… always wondered why they never dropped the 3rd/final installment of the AOI series back then and made the Grind Date instead and never got back to AOI3. Looking forward to this, top 5 HH group of all time.
AOI Trilogy getting completed? Best news of the week. While the AOI albums are my least favorite from De La, they’re still great albums and I really enjoyed them alot.
yeah I think part one was the first de la album that kinda took one to many risks and was a bit messy. some of their best tracks (slept on) mixed with some quite annoying ones. the typical coherency was not quite there but i can’t hate on them for that. the anon nobody is another one where they’ve been bold and brave but in a good way. it’ll age well in the sense that it’ll take a while for it to be fully appreciated. or at least for some of the songs to be. i think it’s underrated and somewhat forgotten already and barely gets a mention, even from the boys themselves but that’s fine with me. it kind of suits the theme. it perhaps gets incorrectly looked upon as cheap due to having been crowd-funded, but there’s definitely gold there and some tunes that will grow with the listener. but some people might be surprised to know or realize that bionix is quite coherent in the sense that it can (or at least could, at the time) be listened to on loop, like say, stakes. I mean all their stuff pretty much can be, and buhloone is one that will increasingly fit this bill but stakes brought with it a more rounded sound. and bionix takes that to the next level. and die hard de la ‘purists’ if you like may take a while to embrace bionix because of how different it is, production-wise – it’s very warm and soulful, mostly lacking any ‘boom-bap’, dirty funk, or even treble in general. many might find it begging for pop success (especially after the random commercial success of a few tracks from part 1 – I never dug ‘ooh’ but very happy for them and also proud that non-de la heads loved it) but if anything, it’s more towards positive nu-soul rap (for lack of a better or precise expression on the spot) and it’s really quite remarkable how they blended genres without anyone really noticing. it’s almost a genre unto itself. a very sweet album. but yeah, I can fully understand heads feeling a bit uncomfortable with it.