A J Dilla beat that outlived its maker by two decades now carries an Eminem feature. IDK released “Welcome” on November 13, 2026, and the label materials describe it as the first song to put the two Detroit names together on one track. The same day, the Maryland-raised rapper announced that Shady Records and Interscope Records will handle all of his future releases.
For IDK, born Jason Aaron Mills in London and raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the deal closes a loop he traces back to childhood. “The first rap album I’ve ever owned was 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. A Shady Records release,” he said in the announcement. “The first raps I made it a point to memorize were Eminem raps.”
A thank-you aimed at the ceiling
The production credit is the headline-grabber. Dilla, born James Dewitt Yancey in Detroit, died in Los Angeles on February 10, 2006, three days after his final album, Donuts, came out. That makes “Welcome” a posthumous production released 20 years and nine months after his death.
IDK framed the session as something close to a conversation with the late producer. “When I first started working on this music, I remember looking up at my ceiling and saying ‘thank you’,” he said. “I was speaking to Dilla because it felt like everything that could have been, in a way, started to clear itself organically.”
Eminem has kept busy as a guest this autumn. Badiyaa covered his surprise appearance on Kid Rock’s Christian album Halfway 2 Jesus in October, and this week marked 30 years since his little-heard debut album Infinite.
A video built from Detroit history
The black-and-white video drops IDK and Eminem into Detroit: kids dancing the local jit style, dice games, industrial sites and warehouse parties. The detail fans will pause on is the car. IDK rides in the same 2004/05 Cadillac Escalade that Dilla once owned, and the driver is Nissan, the son of the late Detroit rapper Proof.
That casting is more than a nod. Proof was Eminem’s closest collaborator in D12, and in 1995 he also recorded the Yester Years EP with Dilla as part of the group 5 Elementz. Putting his son behind the wheel links all three threads of the song, Eminem, Dilla and the city, in a single shot.
A mini-documentary released alongside the single follows IDK from his early years in the DMV, the Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia region, to the present, and includes a conversation with Eminem about the music that first pushed IDK to rap.
How IDK got here
The Shady deal caps a busy stretch. A quick timeline of the past few years:
- 2019: debut studio album Is He Real, with Pusha T, DMX and Tyler, the Creator.
- 2021: USee4Yourself, featuring MF Doom, Westside Gunn and Jay Electronica.
- 2022: Simple., executive produced by Kaytranada.
- January 2026: the mixtape E.T.D.S. (even the devil smiles), including a posthumous DMX feature approved by his estate.
- March 2026: a medley with Black Thought and Kaytranada on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
- June 2026: “Beyond The Brilliant Haze” with Everything Is Recorded and Peter Gabriel.
Outside the studio, he staged the two-day Son de L’Amour Juneteenth celebration in Washington, D.C., and created No Label Academy, a lecture series hosted at Harvard University with guests including Virgil Abloh and Issa Rae.
Dilla’s catalog keeps resurfacing in new forms; last month the 30th-anniversary edition of De La Soul’s Stakes Is High arrived with J Dilla remixes. “Welcome” is out now on streaming services through Shady and Interscope, and IDK has said the single is the first step in a new chapter: “I’m excited for this next chapter in my career.”
Further reading
Image: David Silverman, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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