The Midnight Hour is a project that’s been a long time coming. Los Angeles producer/composer Adrian Younge has been making quite the name for himself over the course of this decade, releasing some great solo albums alongside collaborations with the likes of Ghostface Killah and Bilal. Back in 2013, he found himself working with the legendary deejay/producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad of a Tribe Called Quest, and soon the skeleton of this album was formed. However, the two got tapped to score Marvel’s Luke Cage, and this album was put on the shelf. In between seasons, however, the two finally carved out some time to get back to their collaboration, and now we finally have their debut as a duo, The Midnight Hour.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad came up deejaying and producing for a hip hop group that was steeped in the fundamentals of hard bop, and Adrian Younge has been making his mark using vintage studio techniques to draw upon the symphonic soul of the Blaxploitation soundtracks, amongst other things. Together, they’ve made an album that draws upon classical and jazz to form this lush, smooth, and soulful style. It’s not strictly hip hop, R&B, or anything else, but that all falls under the umbrella of what they are doing. There are a couple of emcees that drop by, such as Ladybug Mecca, but they don’t suddenly shift into a more boom bap sound to fit our expectations. Instead, she finds the pocket of their orchestral arrangement and fits her delivery to that. There are several guests along the way, including Raphael Saadiq, Ceelo Green, Bilal, Karolina, Marsha Ambrosius, Angela Munoz, Eryn Allen Kane, Laetitia Sadier, Questlove, Keyon Harrold, N.O.I.D., James Poyser, Loren Oden, and Saudia Yasmein. While that may seem like a lot of people (and it is), Younge and Muhammad make sure that everyone involved is serving the greater picture of the album as a whole. So while everyone adds their little bit of flavor, no one steals the show and steers things off track. They take someone like Saadiq and place him in this bossa nova setting that he then fits his soul-singing to that works great but doesn’t immediately sound like a Raphael Saadiq song. One of the oddest songs on the album is “So Amazing,” which you might recognize as a Luther Vandross song. What’s interesting here is that Younge and Muhammad took his vocal stems and then composed entirely new music to go along with it. In other contexts, you’d probably call this a remix, but in this case, there aren’t any drum machines or other hip hop or dance production techniques, so it doesn’t feel like a remix when you listen to it. Instead, it just sounds like they found a long lost live recording of the song that breathes new life into the original. While this is all great and fascinating, what’s really wild about this album is that for all of the collaborators that are on this album, it’s really the six instrumental tracks on this album where The Midnight Hour really establishes its identity with this soulful symphonic jazz, where this gorgeous, fully realized style of music comes to fruition, and the rest is just gravy. It just really speaks not just to their chemistry together, but their understanding of arrangements, melody, and song structure to make these instrumental tracks so compelling. On a track like “Mission,” the bass actually carries the melody for the first section of the song, but it’s then passed on to the horns, and then flute, only to reach this climax where they all trade off and feed off of each other. It sounds so effortless, you might take it for granted, but these are the type of things that keep tracks like this engaging and memorable amongst an album full of talented vocalists. The only real strike against the album is that for as much as I enjoyed it, it does go on for twenty tracks and a little over an hour in length, which can be just a little too much to digest in one listening experience. Given how long they’ve been working on this album, though, and how much talent is involved, I can understand why they might have kept it this long.

The Midnight Hour is technically a debut album for this duo, but these two have been working together for five years now, and it shows. This is a thoughtful, mature, soulful, and complex composition that carves out a unique space for them as they weave together everything from neo-soul to hip hop to symphonic pop and jazz. It all comes together for one really compelling listening experience.