We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service

Background

After The Love Movement, A Tribe Called Quest split up due to relationship issues between group members, effectively rendering The Love Movement as the supposed final album. For years on out, Tribe denied that any new material was recorded, or even planned, although they reunited briefly to play several shows during Kanye West's Yeezus Tour in 2013. On November 13, 2015, the group performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the same night of the Paris attacks. Feeling "charged", the group put aside their differences, and decided to record the album in secrecy. Q-Tip has stated it is their last album.

The album's production is attributed to Q-Tip, with longtime hip-hop engineer Blair Wells given co-producer credit. The group's DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, was unable to co-produce the album with Q-Tip, as he was producing the Luke Cage soundtrack with Adrian Younge at the time; therefore, his name does not appear in the album's credits. Scratching credits on the album are instead attributed to DJ Scratch.

The album's title was chosen by Phife Dawg, and although the other members did not understand its meaning, they kept it in place after his death.

Release and reception

We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service was released by Epic Records on November 11, 2016, to widespread acclaim from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 91, based on 26 reviews; it was the year's best-reviewed hip hop album and fourth best-reviewed album overall, according to the website. Ray Rahman from Entertainment Weekly wrote that the record "vividly demonstrates the group's unassailable greatness and continued relevance", while Christopher R. Weingarten of Rolling Stone believed that "in both delivery and content", A Tribe Called Quest "maintain the attitude of the Bohemian everydude funkonauts that inspired Kanye West, Andre 3000 and Kendrick Lamar (who all appear here)". Robert Christgau hailed it as a "triumph" in his review for Vice, writing that the record "represents both their bond and the conscious black humanism they felt sure the nation was ready for ... urging us to love each other as much as we can as we achieve a happiness it's our duty to reaccess if we're to battle as all we can be." In Spin, Brian Josephs praised how the group "worked with the understanding that black music at its finest conversed with ancestry while pointing toward future possibilities in resistance against the racist forces that run parallel." According to Michael Madden from Consequence of Sound, the album exhibits "the classic Tribe sound: a warm and crisp confluence of East Coast hip-hop, jazz, and more, all mixed and mastered impeccably", while Clayton Purdom of The A.V. Club believed the music had more in common with Q-Tip's 2008 solo album The Renaissance than with the group's previous work; he called We got it from Here...' "a sinuous sound collage pulling much more from ’90s and ’00s R&B than it does Native Tongues boom-bap". In The Observer, Kitty Empire wrote that "as the album enters its final third, some focus is lost, but the first two-thirds take no prisoners either lyrically or musically."

We got it from Here... debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, earning 135,000 album-equivalent units, with 112,000 of that figure being pure album sales. It became A Tribe Called Quest's second number one album, and their first since 1996, marking the longest time between number one albums for a hip hop act.

At the end of 2016, We got it from Here... was named one of the year's best albums by several publications; according to Metacritic, it was the eighth most ranked record on critics' year-end lists. Four critics named it the best album of 2016, including Annie Mac from BBC Radio 1. It was ranked third by Complex; fourth by Billboard, Paste, Q, Slant Magazine, and Spin; fifth by Clash; sixth by The Independent and State; seventh by Pitchfork; eighth by Fact; and tenth by Esquire. New York Times chief critic Jon Pareles ranked We got it from Here... third on his own year-end list. Christgau named it 2016's best album in his ballot for The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.

Track listing

All tracks were produced by Q-Tip and co-produced by Blair Wells.

Notes

Sample credits

Personnel

Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.