The saying goes that art is never finished, just abandoned. But the best artists in any generation—the ones most finely attuned to the world around them, and to their own creative instincts—can sense the precise moment when their work is ready. For Saba and No ID, the process of making From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID, their hotly anticipated joint album (earlier dubbed a mixtape), was long, involved, and not always linear. It entailed mountains of demos, months of reconsideration, and even a hard reset. Yet when the time came to push the button, there was no hesitation. From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID is the sort of record rap fans across generations adore: technically dazzling but thematically dense, irresistibly kinetic even as it dives deep into Saba’s psyche.

It’s difficult to imagine two people better equipped to embody those multitudes than this pair. No ID’s illustrious career stretches back more than three decades; his seminal work with Common helped earn Chicago hip-hop its place in the national conversation, and subsequent collaborations with the likes of Jay-Z, Kanye West, Beyonce, Drake, Rihanna, and others have netted him several Grammy nominations and wins across the top categories without compromising his warm, technically rigorous style. Saba, meanwhile, has been hailed as one of the most evocative artists of his generation, with his last two albums in particular—2018’s diaristic CARE FOR ME and Few Good Things, his soulful LP from 2022—earning universal critical acclaim.
‍

In addition to his production catalog, No ID has a long track record as an executive. He ran West’s G.O.O.D. Music and was Executive Vice President and head of A&R at Def Jam while running his own imprint there, the now-independent ARTium Recordings. It was in this capacity that the two artists first spoke. “Me and Saba have been talking for years,” No ID says, “but it might be about business and labels and this and that. Over time, once we got past all the barriers and walls that exist in the business, then we could dig into: What do you like? What do I like?”
‍

As mentioned, that journey, to discover the truest version of what each man was searching for on this record, was expansive. A year before its release, From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID was believed to be done. But life has a habit of getting in the way—and of pushing artists to dig deeper. “I was pretty close to being done the last time, or so I thought,” Saba says. “I just experienced a great loss: I lost my uncle in October. He’s the person who made me fall in love with hip-hop. It made me want to re-approach things; I had to have a lot of conversations with myself that I hadn’t had to have in a long time.”

Some of those conversations with himself took on an even stranger form. One of the most arresting songs on From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID is “How To Impress God,” an exercise in self-analysis so powerful that it feels at once inextricable specific to Saba and like a demand for the listener to examine his or her own relationship with the values they claim to hold. It’s the type of concept record that is staggering first for its ingenious conceit and then, on repeat listens, for the depths it manages to mine.

None of which is to say that From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID is short on brighter fare. From the buoyant opener “Every Painting Has A Price” to the playful “Breakdown,” “Woes of the World” and its elastic flow to the way “head.rap” effortlessly spins hair into a metaphor for the passage of time, the album is teeming with style and wit, and with No ID’s inimitable chops. The beat on “Big Picture” is the ideal underline to Saba’s extended photography motif, seeming to give each line the combination of naturalism and nostalgia that defines the best images. Or see the brief “Reciprocity Interlude,” a hypnotic enough beat to serve as the spine of most major albums.

Both Saba and No ID believe that the way to build a legacy—one that honors what came before while forging new ground—is to worry about being as honest as possible in the moment, and let questions of posterity sort themselves out later.  “To be able to have a real career, you have to reinvent your thought process, reinvent your perspective,” No ID explains. “And you can’t do it sitting on the mountaintop, yelling about what you did. You think you know—and then everything changes.”   

“This is some of my most honest music,” Saba says to that point. “That’s something that I can almost single handedly credit to No ID: It felt like I had to give myself permission to step into some of these bags. We had a lot of conversations about rap and what my goals are as an artist, and I feel like I’ve been challenged to step up to how I see myself.” As evidenced by “How To Impress God,” and reaffirmed throughout the album, that honesty is not always comfortable. But From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID is proof that staring into a mirror is the only way to see things as they really are.