Voodoo

D'Angelo's long-delayed second album arrived in January 2000 as the crowning achievement of the neo-soul era, and its stature has only grown since. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece on release — the most widely celebrated record of the year, topping numerous critics' year-end polls — and it has since been canonized on best-of-decade and greatest-of-all-time lists, its reputation climbing rather than cooling over a quarter century. The craft is staggering: D'Angelo's voice is the centerpiece, a smoky, elastic instrument repeatedly singled out as one of the finest in modern soul, while the music around it — loose, bass-heavy funk built in live studio takes with drummer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, bassist Pino Palladino, and trumpeter Roy Hargrove among a collective of Soulquarians collaborators — feels less like a pop record than a late-night jam session captured in real time. The sound was deliberately engineered to feel old, a warm analog throwback to early-'70s soul-funk (with George Clinton reportedly comparing it to Marvin Gaye's landmark *What's Going On*), and that retro texture is precisely what made it timeless.

The style is both the risk and the reward. *Voodoo* is slow, spacious, and minimalist: thirteen tracks stretching to nearly eighty minutes, built on hypnotic grooves that simmer rather than peak, with songs that drift in and out of focus like a mood. Its biggest single, the seven-minute ballad "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," became a cultural event when its video turned its famously reluctant creator into a sex symbol — but the album around it was always the opposite of pop showmanship, an argument for patience and texture over hooks. For a listener in the mood to meet it on its own terms, the result is intoxicating; there are stretches that even sympathetic critics concede drift.

The album's subject matter orbits love, desire, and spirituality, delivered with a lived-in sensuality that reviewers found both brave and slightly opaque. A genuine critical split persists: a decisive majority called it a masterpiece and the apex of its genre, while a small, vocal minority found the looseness self-indulgent and unfocused — the very qualities the majority praised as genius. The debate is about whether the ambition fully lands, not whether the talent behind it is real, and time has overwhelmingly sided with the masterpiece camp.