Busta Rhymes has returned to a creative relationship that never really left his music.
On Tuesday, August 25, Busta released Dillagence II, a full-length project built entirely around production from the late J Dilla.
The album arrives almost two decades after the 2007 Dillagence mixtape and turns a long-running private archive of Dilla beats into a new Busta project rather than a simple anniversary reissue.
Busta went deeper into the Dilla archive
Busta has said J Dilla entrusted him with hundreds of beats during their friendship.
In the years after Dilla’s 2006 death, Busta continued using his production selectively across different releases. Dillagence II changes the scale of that relationship by making Dilla’s production the foundation of the entire album.
SPIN reported that Busta began seriously assembling the project in November 2025 and worked with Dilla’s estate and his mother, Ma Dukes, around the material.
AllMusic lists the finished release at just over an hour, with 19 tracks.
The guest list connects several generations
The track list includes appearances from Lil Wayne, Common, Big Sean, Anderson .Paak, Ludacris, Talib Kweli, Jon Batiste, T3 of Slum Village and others.
One of the most closely watched records is “This Woman,” which includes a posthumous appearance from D’Angelo on the chorus.
D’Angelo died in October 2025. J Dilla died in February 2006.
That makes the song unusually sensitive territory: three artists connected across different periods, with two no longer alive to participate in the release cycle themselves.
RRL is keeping the description narrow. The released track contains D’Angelo vocals over Dilla production within Busta’s new album. Public reporting reviewed by RRL does not establish every archival or contractual detail behind how those recordings were cleared, so those terms should not be invented.
This is not Busta trying to recreate 2007
The original Dillagence became a cult favorite because Busta sounded natural over Dilla’s off-center drums and sample choices.
The new project arrives in a different context. Busta is decades deeper into his career, Dilla’s catalog has become even more revered, and the audience hearing Dillagence II includes listeners who discovered Dilla after his death.
That changes what a sequel has to carry.
The album is working as new Busta Rhymes music, but it is also participating in the continuing life of Dilla’s archive.
The distinction matters because posthumous production can easily become a nostalgia exercise. Busta’s history with Dilla gives the project a documented creative relationship underneath it.
The album arrives during a larger conversation about veteran rappers
Busta’s release also lands while rap has been arguing publicly about how older artists should approach new music.
RRL covered Rick Ross pushing back on 50 Cent’s recent argument that hip-hop is primarily a young person’s game. Dillagence II enters that conversation without needing to answer it directly.
Busta is not releasing a retrospective package and calling it new. He is using unreleased production from a collaborator central to his history and building a present-day album around it.
Whether listeners ultimately rank it beside the first Dillagence will take time. The immediate story is simpler: one of rap’s longest-running MCs has opened a major section of his J Dilla archive and turned it into a full new release.