Midnight Marauders

Recorded over nine months at Battery Studios, Platinum Island Studios and Sorcerer Sound, mixed at Battery and mastered at The Hit Factory. Q-Tip produced most of it, with Skeff Anselm on 8 Million Stories, Large Professor on Keep It Rollin' and Ali Shaheed Muhammad scratching. Raphael Saadiq, credited as Raphael Wiggins, played bass on Midnight. Jarobi White had left the group during the previous album, but kept attending sessions and, in his words, brought the jokes. This time Q-Tip asked Bob Power to leave the noise in the samples, and the album was recorded on an SSL console rather than the Neve of its predecessor. The cover shows a woman painted in Afrocentric colors, as on The Low End Theory, along with the faces of 71 hip-hop figures. A tour guide voice, credited to Laurel Dann, opens the record.

It debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, went gold on 14 January 1994 and platinum on 11 January 1995. Vibe called it a rap classic, and NME called it the group's most complete work to date. Producer Mark Ronson later told NME that it changed the sound of East Coast hip-hop. Rolling Stone placed it at number 201 on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums, and Pitchfork ranked it number 75 among its favorite records of the 1990s.