Today in Hip-Hop: DMX’s ‘Exodus’ Turns 5 — The Posthumous Goodbye That Dropped 49 Days After Yonkers Lost Its Dog

May 28, 2026. Five years ago today, the dog finally got to rest. On May 28, 2021 — exactly forty-nine days after Earl “DMX” Simmons left us at fifty — Exodus, his eighth studio album and only posthumous release, hit streaming services with a “5/28 The Legacy continues…” Instagram caption that read like a benediction. Swizz Beatz had been working DMX in the studio since September 2020. According to Swizz, X would only record in the daytime. “It was like a job,” he said. “We hadn’t done something like this for over thirteen years.”

The Last Bark From Schlobohm

You can’t tell the story of Exodus without telling the story of where it ends. DMX was born in Mount Vernon in 1970, then shipped to Yonkers’ Schlobohm housing projects at age five — the same complex where, in 1988, a young Irv Gotti would walk in to meet two brothers named Joaquin “Waah” and Darrin “Dee” Dean, who were building a label called Ruff Ryders around a kid named Earl who barked like a junkyard dog and rapped like a Pentecostal preacher mid-witness. It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot dropped in 1998 and sold 251,000 in week one. Then DMX did something nobody before or since has done: he put his first five studio albums at number one on the Billboard 200. Tupac was gone. Biggie was gone. DMX became hip-hop’s first new superstar in their wake, and he did it on raw nerve.

How Swizz Built the Goodbye

The sessions ran from September 2020 to January 2021, split between Snoop Dogg’s Los Angeles studio and Latitude Studios in Tennessee. X took a heart attack on April 2, 2021. He died on April 9. Swizz Beatz — executive producer, lifelong collaborator, Ruff Ryders blood — finished what they’d started. Track two, “Bath Salts,” features Jay-Z and Nas trading verses over a 7-track Swizz beat that sounds like a 1998 Ruff Ryders demo updated for the streaming era. It was nominated for Best Rap Song at the 64th Grammys. Track eight, “Hood Blues,” handed the mic to Westside Gunn, Benny the Butcher, and Conway the Machine — Griselda paying respect to the Yonkers dog who walked so the new BX could run. “Letter to My Son (Call Your Father)” — track twelve, Usher on the hook — is the one that breaks you. X recorded a voicemail to his son Exodus, who shares his name with the album, and then never came home.

It debuted at #8 on the Billboard 200 with 32,000 album-equivalent units and #4 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop chart, and racked up over 22 million on-demand streams in week one. The Guardian gave it four stars. Clash gave it an 8. Pitchfork was harsher at 5.8 — they always are with posthumous records — but Rolling Stone said the obvious thing in three stars: the album “can’t escape the reality it exists in.” It wasn’t supposed to. The cover, shot by Jonathan Mannion — the photographer who’d already shot every iconic DMX album cover from It’s Dark forward — closed the loop one last time.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

• Jodeci’s Forever My Lady turns 35. Uptown Records / MCA, May 28, 1991. DeVante Swing pulled R&B closer to hip-hop than anyone had dared, and the rest of New Jack Swing — and the whole Bad Boy template that followed — was downstream of this record.
• Chubb Rock celebrates his birthday. Born May 28, 1968 in Kingston, raised in Brooklyn — the National Merit Scholar who dropped out of Brown to chase the rap dream and dropped “Treat ‘Em Right” in 1990, the song VH1 later ranked #82 on the 100 Greatest Songs of Hip-Hop. Three #1 rap singles from The One that year. Brooklyn legend, full stop.
• Kid Ink’s Almost Home EP turns 13. May 28, 2013 — his major-label debut on RCA, peak #27 on the Billboard 200. Not the LA rapper’s best work, but the moment a mixtape kid officially crossed over.

X used to say it on every album: “Lord, give me a sign.” Five years later, the sign is the work. Press play on “Hood Blues” — that’s the move today.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team