Black Messiah

Produced and mostly written by D'Angelo with Questlove, Pino Palladino, Isaiah Sharkey, Roy Hargrove and Kendra Foster, among others. He resumed work at Electric Lady Studios in 2012, and final sessions took place at MSR, Sear Sound, Avatar and Quad in New York and The Plant and Henson in Los Angeles. The title refers to a memo from J. Edgar Hoover's office in the COINTELPRO program about the possible rise of a Black Messiah. After a listening party in New York it was released digitally on 15 December 2014 through iTunes, Google Play Music and Spotify.

It debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200 with 117,000 copies and at number 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and at 47 in the UK. Metacritic gave it an average of 95. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone called it an "avant-soul dream palace", and many critics compared it to Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On. It won the Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll for 2014 and the Grammy for Best R&B Album in 2016. In 2019 it was ranked 49th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best albums of the 21st century.