The Alchemist

A teenager in Beverly Hills with a shelved record

Alan Daniel Maman was born on 25 October 1977 in Beverly Hills, California, the son of an Israeli father. At fourteen, in 1991, he and the actor Scott Caan formed a rap duo called The Whooliganz. They put out one single, "Put Your Handz Up", in 1993, and their album was shelved by Tommy Boy Records. That early false start pushed him behind the boards rather than in front of them.

DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill took him on as a protégé, and through that connection he began producing for Dilated Peoples and their rapper Evidence. The break that defined his sound came in 1999, when he placed tracks on Mobb Deep's Murda Muzik. His work with Havoc and Prodigy, the sparse loops and dust-caked drums of records like "The Realest", is the reason a producer from West Los Angeles is so often treated as an honorary Queensbridge native.

The catalogue: from 1st Infantry to Voir Dire

His debut album under his own name, 1st Infantry, came in 2004. Its single "Hold You Down" reached number 95 on the Billboard Hot 100, which remains an unusual chart entry for a producer's compilation. From 2005 he took on a very different job, as Eminem's official concert DJ, which meant arena stages and a front-row education in how a rap show is paced. Further solo records followed: Chemical Warfare in 2009 and Russian Roulette in 2012. He also founded his own imprint, ALC Records, which has carried most of his collaborative output since.

The second act of his career has been defined by full-length albums built with a single rapper. Alfredo, with Freddie Gibbs, arrived in 2020 and earned a nomination for Best Rap Album at the 63rd Grammy Awards, the first time the academy had put his name in that category. Haram, with the duo Armand Hammer, followed in 2021, and Voir Dire, with Earl Sweatshirt, in 2023. Each pairing sounds distinct, but the method is constant: a producer who builds an entire world for one voice and then gets out of the way.

In May 2024 that discretion was tested in public. He produced "Meet the Grahams", the Kendrick Lamar track aimed at Drake, and one of the most discussed rap records of that year carried his beat beneath it.

2025: Alfredo 2 and a year of two tours

February 2025 brought Life Is Beautiful, a three-way album with Larry June and 2 Chainz. Then on 25 July 2025 came Alfredo 2, released through ESGN Records, ALC Records and Virgin Music Group, with "1995" as its lead single a week earlier. It is his most commercially successful record to date. It entered the Billboard 200 at number 13 on 37,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, topped the US Independent Albums chart, reached number 28 in the UK and charted in more than a dozen other countries. Critics were as warm as buyers: the album holds a Metacritic score of 82, and Robin Murray of Clash called it "a brilliant return that matches the magic of the original". The promotion included videos for "1995" and "A Thousand Mountains" and a fourteen-minute short film shot in Japan.

Gibbs and The Alchemist then toured the record together for the first time. The North American leg ran from 20 September 2025 in Philadelphia to 9 November in San Francisco, with a European leg from 30 March to 17 April 2026. Almost immediately after the American dates ended, he was in Europe on a completely separate run, the "He's the Preemo, I'm the Chemist" world tour with DJ Premier, which stopped at Amsterdam's Paradiso on 25 November 2025 and then Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg and Turin in the first week of December. That tour has continued into 2026, with a Los Angeles date at The Novo on 9 May.

Before the World Blows: the Badu album, finally

The collaboration with Erykah Badu began, by the accounts of both The Fader and Stereogum, with a request. Badu wanted to rap over Mobb Deep's 1999 track "The Realest", which he produced, and after the two were introduced the conversation grew into a full album. They recorded across 2024 to 2026 in their home cities, Dallas and Los Angeles. A first single, "Next to You", appeared on 20 June 2025, and the record was at one stage expected in August 2025 under the working title Abi & Alan. It slipped by a year.

On 13 August 2026 the pair announced a release date and put out the lead single "Witch Doctor", at that point still without a confirmed album title. The finished record, Before the World Blows, arrived on 28 August 2026 through Control Freaq and Young. It runs seventeen tracks and just under sixty-three minutes, with production credited to The Alchemist, Badu and Mike Chavarria, and guests including Westside Gunn, Thundercat, D.R.A.M., Earl Sweatshirt, Steve Lacy and Kamasi Washington. It is Badu's first studio album since New Amerykah Part Two in 2010.

Reviewing it for NME on 1 September 2026, Oumar Saleh described his contribution as "dusty loops" and "smoke-stained samples" that give Badu's ideas a deliberately unstable home, and noted that she rearranged and programmed elements herself until singer and producer became indistinguishable. He picked out "I Just Play a Part" with Westside Gunn, "To the Moon (Plan C)" with Steve Lacy and "Next 2 U", which reworks a Mobb Deep sample, while conceding that some tracks feel underdeveloped and calling the whole "curious and vividly unfinished". In its first chart week the album reached number 7 on the UK R&B Albums chart, number 10 on the UK Album Downloads chart and number 32 on the US Independent Albums chart.

What a show is like now

He is not a rapper who happens to produce, so the live question is what a producer actually does on stage. The clearest recent account is a review of the Alfredo tour's sold-out Toronto date at the club HISTORY on 19 October 2025. Three opening acts came first: the Canadian rapper Insyt, the Swedish instrumental group Sven Wunder, and the North Carolina rapper Mavi with the producer Ovrkast. The headline set opened with the first three tracks of Alfredo, mirrored them with the first three of Alfredo 2, then alternated between the two albums before Gibbs broke pattern with four songs from his wider catalogue and closed, after an encore, with the last two tracks of Alfredo 2. The show ran past the venue's usual eleven o'clock curfew. The Alchemist stayed at the turntables throughout, spinning and occasionally remixing live, at one point flipping "I Still Love H.E.R." into the sample beneath Mobb Deep's "The Realest", and stepping up to deliver his own verse on "Ferraris in the Rain". Gibbs made his entrances through a stage set dressed as an Asian restaurant, once from its roof. The reviewer called it "beautifully curated" and wished only for more older material.

The Premier dates are a different animal: two producers, no rapper, and a set built from the records they made. Setlist.fm's log of the Berlin show at Metropol on 30 November 2025 gives a 9.05pm start and an 11pm finish, with an average across logged shows of one hour and forty-one minutes, and notes Nas's "N.Y. State of Mind" and Limp Bizkit and Method Man's "N 2 Gether Now" among the records played.

The current Badu run, billed as Erykah Badu and The Alchemist Present: Live, opened on 10 September 2026 at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, and closes on 29 September at the Hollywood Bowl. In between it takes in Detroit, Toronto's RBC Amphitheatre on 13 September, Cleveland, Uncasville, Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on 18 September, Wolf Trap in Virginia, Indianapolis, Denver's Fillmore Auditorium, San Diego and the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. De La Soul support the bulk of the dates and Smino takes over for the West Coast shows in San Diego, Berkeley and Los Angeles. Stereogum reported that the two had already performed the new songs together at no-phone shows before the album came out. At the time of writing no professional review of the opening night had been published.