Busta Rhymes releases the single This Woman with D'Angelo over a J Dilla beat

Busta Rhymes released This Woman on 28 August, a single featuring D'Angelo over production from J Dilla. Two of the three men on the record are dead, which makes it a meeting that could only happen in an archive.

The beat is unmistakably Dilla: the off-kilter drum swing, the warm vinyl crackle, a lush bassline that sits low and does not move much. It came out of the vault rather than a session, and it carries the same unhurried feel as the instrumentals that made his name.

Busta does something unusual on top of it. He drops the rapid-fire delivery he is known for and works in a measured, reflective cadence instead, dedicating his verses to the strength and complexity of women rather than to his own technique. D'Angelo takes the chorus and bridge in layered harmonies, doing the thing that made his own catalogue so hard to imitate.

He was one of Dilla's most frequent collaborators and has kept a large store of the producer's unreleased instrumentals for years, which is why material like this still surfaces at all. Pulling a soul-drenched beat from that archive and pairing it with a D'Angelo guest appearance, always a rare thing to get, is the whole design of the record.

This Woman sits between classic hip-hop and contemporary R&B rather than in either, which is roughly where Dilla always worked. Busta has spent much of the year in the same archive, revisiting Dilla's unfinished work on a full album after setting Dillagence 2 for late August. The single is logged on the release calendar.