De La Soul - Cabin in the Sky
With Cabin in the Sky, De La Soul return after nearly a decade of silence with a record shaped by memory, loss, and continuity. The album carries the imprint of Trugoy the Dove’s passing, yet it refuses to fold into mourning. Instead, it balances commemoration with movement, reflection with vitality, and reverence with creative curiosity. It feels like a document built to honor the past without being trapped by it.
Across its generous runtime, Cabin in the Sky deploys a wide constellation of producers and guests—Nas, Q-Tip, Common, Killer Mike, Black Thought—ensuring that each track sits at a slightly different angle to the group’s core aesthetic. The beats oscillate between warm soul, crisp boom-bap, jazz-inflected loops, and brighter, celebratory backdrops. This breadth gives the album momentum but also makes it function less as a singular narrative and more as a curated anthology of moods, ideas, and voices.
Moments featuring Trugoy’s posthumous contributions are among the most affecting. His presence is woven with care—never used as a spectacle, never as a fragile relic. Instead, his verses and fragments become gravitational points inside songs that otherwise radiate outward. These passages add emotional depth to an album that often favors energy, collaboration, and uplift.
The record’s strongest tracks are those that embrace restraint: mid-tempo grooves with space to breathe, understated samples, and lyrical reflection that allows the weight of experience to surface without sentimentality. In these quieter pockets, the album reveals its emotional core and its maturity. Elsewhere, more exuberant cuts—packed with guests, layered production, and bright instrumentation—lean into celebration, sometimes at the expense of coherence.
The scale of Cabin in the Sky is both its greatest strength and its clearest limitation. It showcases De La Soul’s adaptability, their reverence for craft, and their ability to bridge eras. Yet its wide scope and shifting tones dilute the through-line that might have elevated it from a strong return to a definitive statement. Instead, it stands as a generous, heartfelt, and skillfully assembled work—one that honors its history while remaining firmly rooted in the present.
Genre: Soul Rap
Country: US
Final Verdict: 65% (Good Album)
Yearly Ranking: 291th / 825
Highlight: YUHDONTSTOP
Made me think of:
A Tribe Called Quest
The Roots
Common
#newalbum #newalbum2025 #albumrelease #newmusic #albumoftheday #nowspinning #NowPlaying #musicdiscovery
#SoulRap #DeLaSoul #US
#LP #Album #release
