Busta Rhymes Builds 'Dillagence II' From 300 Unreleased J Dilla Beats, Including a Posthumous D'Angelo Feature
Busta Rhymes has announced Dillagence II, a 19-track album built from nearly 300 previously unreleased J Dilla beats that the late producer handed to him before his death in 2006. The record includes a posthumous D'Angelo vocal on the track "This Woman," drawn from a session Dilla and D'Angelo recorded roughly two decades ago that never became a finished project (Rolling Stone).
J Dilla, born James Yancey, was a Detroit producer whose drum work and sample programming shaped hip-hop throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. He died of lupus-related complications in February 2006 at the age of 32. D'Angelo, the neo-soul singer and multi-instrumentalist behind Voodoo and Black Messiah, died of pancreatic cancer in October 2025 (Billboard).
The Dilla-D'Angelo session sat unfinished for years. Busta Rhymes told The New York Times about it in a recent interview: "They started something and it just never got finished" (Rolling Stone). "This Woman" uses what is described as a scratch vocal — an informal, first-take recording — of D'Angelo interpolating Sister Nancy's dancehall standard "Bam Bam" over one of Dilla's beats.
A music video for "This Woman," directed by Hype Williams, is set to premiere at 12 p.m. ET on 25 August, the same day the announcement was reported (Rolling Stone). Williams is the director behind landmark hip-hop visuals for Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott and Kanye West, among many others across three decades.
The album's title nods to Dillagence, a 2008 mixtape on which Busta Rhymes rapped over Dilla production. Dillagence II broadens the scope: the 19-track listing includes features from Lil Wayne, Common, Big Sean, Anderson .Paak, Ludacris and Jon Batiste (Rolling Stone).
After D'Angelo's death in 2025, Busta Rhymes released a tribute song titled "Magic." "This Woman" now stands as a second, if unintended, posthumous collaboration — two artists gone from the same recording, connected through a beat tape handed off two decades ago.
