The production – largely the work of Swizz Beatz – is grimy and atonal, chants deputising for musical hooks, backing made up of klaxons, low-end buzzing and echo-drenched voices.
It feels out of place here because the tone of Exodus is impressively bleak and relentless: for all the starry cast, it feels far more like a bold restatement of core values than an attempt to follow trends. There’s a fresh generation of rappers including recent US chart-topper Moneybagg Yo and, in one intriguing instance, a vocal rescued from the cutting-room floor: Bono’s contribution to Skyscrapers, a game attempt at spiritual uplift, apparently dates back to at least the early 00s. Clearly his contacts list was raided, with old enmities soothed: Jay-Z, who DMX once described as his “arch nemesis”, turns up on Bath Salt, his smooth boasts about his wealth contrasting sharply with DMX’s raw-throated, desperate-sounding threats of violence. There are more guest appearances in these 40 minutes than on his first three albums combined. Whatever else it may be, it isn’t the kind of posthumous hip-hop album that arrives cobbled together from studio outtakes: according to producer Swizz Beatz, only one track – Money Money Money – was compiled following DMX’s death.Īnd Exodus was clearly intended to spectacularly revive DMX’s career. He had been talking up Exodus – apparently recorded at Snoop’s studio after the Verzuz battle – in the months before his death.
He had, most observers conceded, just snatched victory from Snoop Dogg in a battle on the webcast Verzuz that provoked a plethora of online memes. He re-signed to Def Jam, the label on which he had dominated hip-hop at the turn of the millennium: each of the five albums he released for the label went to No 1 in the US, a still-unbroken record, selling more than 16m copies in that country alone. He had celebrated his release from jail in 2019 with a startling appearance at Kanye West’s Sunday Service, preaching the gospel in the manner of an ill-humoured battle rapper planning on concluding his verse by punching his opponent’s teeth out.
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