A legendary unreleased track from the late D’Angelo, titled ‘Bitch’, has been unearthed.
The icon of neo-soul and R&B passed away on October 14 at the age of 51, after a prolonged private battle with pancreatic cancer.
This weekend, a bundle of archival content from the musician’s vault surfaced online, and among the files was a recording of ‘Bitch’, a song that has been sought after by D’Angelo fans for many years but which had never previously been heard.
During an interview with Red Bull Music Academy in 2014, D’Angelo and The Roots drummer and key D’Angelo collaborator Questlove spoke about the existence of ‘Bitch’, which they confirmed had been recorded in 1996 and intended for the soundtrack to Set It Off.
They said they saw ‘Bitch’ as the unofficial start of the period that led to the recording of the 2000 album ‘Voodoo’, marking a shift to a looser, off-kilter rhythm inspired by the work of producer J Dilla. Describing the sound, Questlove said, “it was drunk, but it was perfect”.
Check out the 2014 interview here:
After D’Angelo’s death, Questlove revealed that a posthumous album could be on the way. Asked to describe the music, he said: “It’s always the sound of yesterday but for the future, and this record’s no different”.
Following the tragic news, several major names in the music industry paid their respects to the ‘Brown Sugar’ musician, including Beyoncé, Chic icon Nile Rodgers and Lauryn Hill.
NME wrote: “His few albums – ‘Brown Sugar’ (1995), ‘Voodoo’ (2000) and ‘Black Messiah’ (2014) – are each held up as ground-breaking, scene-reviving masterpieces of modern soul, illuminating the personal and political struggles of our times. Yet the man who made them – often at great length, in isolation and intent on becoming a pure conduit from music’s past to its future – will forever remain an enigma; soul’s mist-shrouded oracle, darkened far too soon.”
D’Angelo is just one of a number of musical legends that we lost in 2025, and NME has put together a tribute to them all, which you can find here.