Today (Nov. 24), HipHopDX shared a snippet from a new interview with Swizz Beatz, who is currently promoting his “Drive With Swizz Beatz” series alongside his son, Nasir Dean. In the clip, the legendary producer was asked about the possibility of another posthumous DMX album.
“Well, the first album wasn’t posthumous. The first album he actually did, and produced, and had all of the direction. A lot of people wanted to see X go harder, stronger. They even blamed me for it. But it’s actually what he wanted to do,” he said, referring to 2021’s Exodus, which was released a month after DMX’s passing. “He was like, ‘Yo, I don’t wanna shoot up and kill everybody in a verse, that’s not what I’m doing.’ He was preparing to go to the next level and do TV shows — like what we’re doing on the family-oriented side — and he was preparing to graduate his brand.”
He continued, “And so this is why he refrained from doing a bunch of aggressive songs. If you listen to the album, he got songs with my wife, he got songs with Marvin Gaye. It was just a different vibe. This is the music that X really listened to that people don’t know. They think he was just listening to ‘shoot ’em up, bang, bang’ music all day. I never heard him listening to that type of music. I always heard X listening to old classics, amazing music. And I felt that he was at a point in his life where he was like, ‘You know what? I want to change up the energy. Not only in my music, but around me.'”
As far as whether or not a follow-up to Exodus will surface in the future, Swizz admittedly wasn’t sure. “We have other songs. Can we make a new X album? For sure,” he expressed. “Will I make another X album? I don’t know. It has to feel good.”