A few months after the death of founding member Phife Dawg, legendary hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest is planning to release their first new album in nearly 20 years, according to Epic Records CEO L.A. Reid. In an interview with the Rap Radar podcast, Reid said that the entire album was recorded before Phife’s death in March and will feature the whole crew—even Jarobi White, the elusive fourth member who has not appeared on a Tribe album since the group’s 1990 debut.
The group was memorably the subject of Michael Rapaport’s moving 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, which chronicled their fraught friendships. The foursome later reunited for a series of “final” concerts in 2013 and a performance on The Tonight Show in 2015, but they haven’t released a studio album since 1998’s The Love Movement. If nothing else, it should be nice to hear the whole team get together to kick it one last time.
