For a while, you would have beeen forgiven for thinking that, as per the promise of their 1991 album, perhaps De La Soul were, finally, dead. It had been quiet for some time. Twenty-one years of label strife and copyright skirmishes, with only 2016’s And the Anonymous Nobody serving as a brief intermission. Then, tragedy struck. In March 2023, when Dave “Trugoy” – one of the groups’ two MCs; a soft spoken, Dadaist poet – passed away at fifty-four, what was assumed began to feel guaranteed.
For the greats of 90s hip-hop though, 2025 has become the year when miracles happen. Announced in April, Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It series has been a boon for devotees of the first golden age of rap. Slick Rick released his first album in twenty-one years (it was good!); Ghostface dropped a sequel to Supreme Clientele and, still to come, an album from Nas and DJ premiere, a collaboration first rumoured before the iPod. And now, for Mass Appeal’s next trick? Cabin in the Sky. Suddenly, De La Soul are alive.
The long island trio were always a singular group, despite the various misconceptions which float around them. Despite their reputation, they were not – as The Guardian claimed as recently as last week – a permanently buoyant, sunshine band. From their aforementioned second album onwards, their music mixed the beauteous, funk-flecked stylings of Prince Paul with an increasingly palpable anxiety about fame and the world around them. Despite the stature of 3 Feet High and Rising, the trio did not peak with their debut either. All four of their first albums, in fact, are of equal greatness, each stretching their sound in directions both trippier and – with 1996’s Stakes Is High – far darker too. All their multitudes are present in their return.
Cabin in the Sky is a grief album, through and through. It begins with the rarest of things: a three-minute spoken-word intro actually worth listening to, in which Gustavo Fring reads a rollcall of the album’s guest MCs only to finish with Trugoy’s name; his call met, of course, with silence. What follows somehow embodies everything which made their sound so distinct back in 1989. There are pop tracks (the Roy Ayers-flipping ‘Cruel Summers Bring FIRE LIFE!!’ and follow up ‘Day in The Sun (Getting’ Wit U)’) which actually manage to capture the same baggy swagger of classics like ‘Me Myself & I’. Then there are the sharp conceptual cuts à la ‘Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa’; ‘A Quick 16 For Mama’ doing what it says on the tin with aplomb.
Some of these songs seem to scratch the same itch as their classic records so acutely that I actually began to doubt myself. As fun as Legend Has It has been, nostalgia plays an outsized role in the fun. A new Raekwon project is always welcome, but few would argue that The Emperor’s New Clothes stacks up against Cuban Linx… So naturally, around halfway through the Dilla-time ‘Good Health’, as I sat screw-faced, listening to Trugoy’s voice dip in an out of the skew-whiff drums so sublimely, I began to question… is this just nostalgia? Or is this really as good as it sounds? But as Cabin in the Sky plays on, the hits kept coming. There’s a truly beautiful sample flip straight out of the Camron playbook of ‘Different World’, and compelling verses from Nas and Black Thought, two of the best to ever do it.
The albums reaches its climax with the title track, in which Posdnuos pays tribute to his most enduring collaborator and high school friend, followed by the only song written and completed by Trugoy in the years before his death, with a chorus which quotes the legendary refrain from ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash. Unlike the scraps which comprised the recent Big L record, ‘Don’t Push Me’ is a dignified send-off delivered, as per the album’s logic, from the great booth in the sky.
Cabin in the Sky is, it’s fair to say, the pinnacle of the Legend Has It series. It’s good enough that you could even pitch it as the fitting finale for an entire era of rap, one whose greatest voices are now firmly approaching pension age. But the album actually creates the opposite problem: it’s too alive to be an ending, too rich with ideas and sonic pleasures. These guys might just have to keep on going. Look around the rap landscape in 2025 and De La Soul’s influence still lingers, from MIKE’s afro-futurist funk to Noname’s bookishness ebullience. As Posdnous raps on ‘Good Health’, “no need to put the city on my back, just the world on my sound”. This world’s still theirs.
