Nelly used his annual Black and White Ball in December 2025 to announce something hip hop fans had stopped expecting. The St. Lunatics, the St Louis rap collective that helped Nelly break in 2000 and put out their only group album in 2001, are recording a follow up. Metro Boomin will executive produce. The target is a 2026 release. Twenty five years after Free City, with most of the original members in their late forties and the production landscape unrecognizable from what it was in the Country Grammar era, the project is one of the more interesting rollouts on the calendar this year.
The St. Lunatics matter to anyone who grew up on Midwestern rap. Nelly, Murphy Lee, Spud City, Kyjuan, and Slo Down were a tightly knit group whose chemistry showed up on Nelly's first three solo albums and on their own 2001 release. The breakup of the group's relationship with Ali, who has had a public falling out with Nelly that has lasted years, is not yet resolved publicly. Whether Ali appears on the new album has not been confirmed and Nelly has been deliberately quiet about it. The 2024 American Music Awards reunion brought Nelly, Murphy, Spud, Kyjuan, and Slo Down on stage together for a surprise performance of classic tracks. Ali was not part of that performance.
Metro Boomin's involvement is the headline. Metro has shaped modern hip hop production through his work with Future, 21 Savage, The Weeknd, Travis Scott, and the Spider Verse soundtrack. He executive produced Future and Metro Boomin We Don't Trust You and We Still Don't Trust You, two of the most commercially successful and culturally important releases of 2024. Pairing him with the St. Lunatics signals an intent to do something more than a nostalgia cash in. Metro tends to push artists toward sharp song structures, defined hooks, and beats that work in clubs and in cars. The St. Lunatics will not sound like 2001 on this album. They probably should not.
The cultural question matters too. The 2020s have produced a series of group reunion attempts in hip hop, most of which have not fully landed. Wu Tang's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin remains in private hands. The Lox have stayed productive but at a smaller scale than their 1990s peak. The few attempts at collective recording from groups with twenty year histories have struggled to bridge the gap between the era that produced them and the streaming infrastructure that defines the present moment. Working with a producer who is fluent in 2026 sound is one way to attempt that bridge.
Nelly himself has had a productive run since the loss of his sister Jackie in 2005, the slowdown of his commercial career in the late 2000s, and the resurgence around the country crossover work and the Pillow Talk podcast with Ashanti. The marriage to Ashanti and the public family life have rehabilitated his image with a generation of fans who knew him from his run on country radio more than from his run on Hot 97. The St. Lunatics rollout is partly about reclaiming the rap legacy and partly about giving Murphy Lee and the others a real moment that has not been available to them since the early 2000s.
For St Louis the album is a chance to reset the city's place in the rap conversation. The Lou has produced some of the most distinctive voices in hip hop history, Nelly chief among them, and the city has not had a national moment of comparable scale in over a decade. The local press has covered the announcement with the kind of attention usually reserved for major sports stories. The Black music infrastructure in St Louis is small relative to Atlanta or Houston, and a successful rollout of the St. Lunatics album would push more attention toward the artists, producers, and engineers working there.
What to watch for over the next six months. First, the rollout strategy. Metro tends to control the visual and sonic environment of his albums tightly. Expect a lead single that signals the direction of the project rather than a one off radio play. Second, the feature list. The St. Lunatics on a Metro Boomin produced project naturally invites guests like Future, 21 Savage, and other Metro adjacent voices, which would extend the album's reach to a younger audience. Third, the resolution of the Nelly and Ali situation. Whether the album reflects the full original lineup will say something about the project's intent.
Twenty five years between group albums is a long time. Most artists do not get a second moment of this size. The St. Lunatics have one. The work is whether they take it.