Busta Rhymes Revives the Dilla Legacy with 19-Track Dillagence II

By now you've probably clocked it: the Associated Press confirms Busta Rhymes just dropped "Dillagence II" — a 19-track reckoning built from J Dilla's compositions and Rhymes' performances, picking up exactly where their 2007 joint mixtape left off. Across their working relationship, Dilla sent Rhymes upward of 300 beats. Twenty years after Dilla's death from lupus complications at 32, the crates are finally open.

The Sound

"Dillagence II" refuses to chase a 2026 sound. No moody synth pad, no AI-assisted hook, no streaming-farm filler. Just Rhymes rapping over the off-kilter rhythms that rewired 21st-century popular music — Dilla's signature blend of straightforward and uneven beats, what the culture has long called "Dilla Time."

You hear it hardest on "Spazzz," where a tuneless woodwind slices through his braggadocio as he spits "I spit in ciphers, and I got the game locked more than categorized lifers." No speed-rap sprint — pure athletic pocket from a veteran with three decades of stage time. On "Talk Ya (Expletive)" with Lil Wayne — reportedly his first time ever on a Dilla beat — both emcees float above the bouncy production like they were engineered for it. The chemistry is instant.

The Features

The guest list is a cultural ledger. Ma Dukes, Dilla's mother, appears multiple times — including on "Royalty," where Rhymes' own children, CIE and Trillian, join her. There's a generational handoff stitched directly into that record, a quiet passing of the torch from producer's family to emcee's family.

Then there's "This Woman" with D'Angelo — a posthumous track born from a collaboration Dilla and D'Angelo reportedly kicked off over twenty years ago and never finished in their lifetimes. D'Angelo died last October after a long fight with cancer, so hearing his voice threaded through these Dilla compositions lands somewhere it couldn't have twelve months ago. It's the standout of the project, and it's not close.

The Verdict

Hype Williams — yes, that Hype Williams — directed the official visual, dragging the whole package back to late-'90s maximalism at a moment when most legacy acts are quietly chasing algorithmic comfort. The aesthetic intent is unmistakable: this is meant to feel like a time capsule, not a pivot.

The bar for posthumous rapper projects is on the floor right now. Recycled acapellas, ghostwritten stems, weekend AI renders cluttering streaming queues. "Dillagence II" doesn't reinvent anything — and AP's writeup is honest about that. But it honors a working relationship instead of mining one. Across 19 tracks, Rhymes treats those 300 beats like sacred text rather than sample-pack inventory. In 2026, that's a harder move than it sounds.