On the morning A$AP Rocky began work on his second album, he carried more than ambition. He carried a reputation. He carried a wave. After bursting from Harlem with Live.Love.A$AP in 2011 and converting that momentum into a major-label debut with Long.Live.A$AP in January 2013, Rocky had become a public figure defined by taste as much as by bars. Fashion and Tumblr aesthetics had gotten him attention. So had his ear for beats. The first album proved he could turn those instincts into chart success. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 139,000 first week sales. That fact changed what was possible around him. It also changed what he owed himself artistically.

Everything that led into AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP was a collision of grief, appetite, and reach. In late 2014 and early 2015 Rocky was expanding his palette and his collaborators. He talked of working with British singers, of bringing in producers outside the usual New York circuit, and of making a record that would not simply repeat the glossy swagger of his debut. Then the album’s private axis shifted. A$AP Yams, the collective’s strategist and Rocky’s closest creative mentor, died on January 18, 2015. Yams had been credited as an executive producer on the record. His absence reframed almost every choice Rocky had already made. Songs that had been tracks became elegies. Plans for release were adjusted. The loss landed on the project like a new key.

The record that followed was both wider and weirder than people expected. Rocky pulled in producers from different generations and different geographies. He worked with Danger Mouse as a principal executive producer. He tapped Kanye West, Madlib, Mark Ronson, The Alchemist, Emile Haynie, Jim Jonsin, FNZ, and others. He also integrated a recurring collaborator who was not a household name. Joe Fox, a British guitarist and singer Rocky met in London, appears in multiple spots on the album. The result was a push toward psychedelia, toward live-sounding guitar and pastoral loops, and toward an attempt to sound larger than the traditional rap album format. Rocky spoke then of reclaiming a legacy. He called the album A.L.L.A. as slang for "Allah." The phrase announced an ambition to claim a higher place among MCs.

By spring of 2015 the album existed in two forms in public imagination. To some it was a psychedelic experiment, dropping in samples of British rock and Rod Stewart and inviting Joe Fox’s haunted voice into the fold. To others it was a testimony. The record was finished enough that it could be released. It leaked a week early. In response Rocky and his label moved the street date up to May 26, 2015. Fans and reviewers arrived to a record that was both carefully curated and purposely messy. It was an album shaped by fashion and grief. It was an album that wanted to make room for time.

What mattered before the first note was played was that Rocky wanted to change the frame. He wanted to be more than a Harlem style icon. He wanted to use voice and texture to suggest interior life. He wanted guests who signaled eras as much as scenes. And he wanted an album that could contain a mentor’s death without collapsing into obvious sentiment. Those aims are the pressure and the oxygen that enter every song on AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP.

The sessions for AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP spread between London and New York and moved through a constellation of studios. Recording locations listed on the album’s credits include Dean Street Studios and Sarm Studios in London and Electric Lady, Downtown Studios, The Purple Palace, and Germany Studios in New York. Additional work took place at Azari Studios, Red Bull Studios London, Clockwork Studios and several Los Angeles rooms. The geography mattered. Rocky was deliberately cross-pollinating scenes. London added a looser, psychedelic feel. New York kept the record tethered.

Production was organized around a handful of anchors and dozens of contributors. The most visible anchor was Danger Mouse, who served as an executive producer and supplied production on multiple songs, including the album’s opening and several interstitial pieces. Credits also show co-executive producers Hector Delgado and Juicy J, with Rocky himself listed among the executive producers. Other principal producers include Kanye West, Mark Ronson, Emile Haynie, The Alchemist, Madlib, Mike Dean, Jim Jonsin, FNZ, and Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E.. The presence of both sample-forward producers and beatmakers steeped in trap created a deliberate tension between atmosphere and punch.

The instrumental palette favored guitars, warped samples, and an array of analogue touches. Joe Fox’s guitar and vocals recur across the album and give several tracks an odd, streetwise folk quality. Samples range from the Python Lee Jackson piece that supplies "Everyday" with Rod Stewart’s voice to lucent Spaghetti Western flourishes on "Pharsyde." Electronic elements are present too. Producers used modern trap percussion and 808 low end. But the record often treats those elements like punctuation. On many cuts the drums arrive late. On others the beat is folded into a wash of guitars and keyboards. Mixing duties were shared by engineers including Hector Delgado, Jaycen Joshua, Kennie Takahashi, and Mike Dean. Mastering is credited to Dave Kutch. Those choices kept the album hazy and physical at the same time.

A few technical anecdotes mark the sessions and the album’s final texture. Rocky reportedly discovered Joe Fox on the streets of London and invited him into studio rooms in Dean Street and Red Bull Studios. The Rod Stewart sample on "Everyday" required coordination with a large production team. That track lists co-producers such as Mark Ronson, Emile Haynie, Jeff Bhasker, and Hudson Mohawke, creating a layered production that merges sample recontextualization with modern programming. The single "Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye 2" came from a different angle. Produced by drill-adjacent team Nez & Rio, it is a propulsive, siren-laced performance cut intended for maximum impact live. The album’s varied recording environments and split production responsibilities are audible. The project moves from crafted pop-soul to brutal club banger while keeping a signature, nocturnal sheen.

Holy Ghost The album opens with a prayer and a mood. The track, produced in part by Danger Mouse with contributions credited to DJ Khalil, plants a looped, almost hymn-like guitar under Joe Fox’s vocals. Rocky slides into the space like a visitor. Lyrically the song registers mortality and presence. It reads as both invocation and elegy. Placed first, it sets a frame for the album. The listener is told from the start that this will not be the same party record as the debut.

Canal St. A cut built on minimal, haunted piano and a samplesource associated with the underground, this track features Bones and credits Rocky with co-production alongside Danny Wolf and Hector Delgado. The beat is lean. The rhyme is compact and streetbound. Rocky uses the song to reassert neighborhood credentials while the track’s production nods to cloud-rap origins and the lo-fi currents that had been sliding through his scene. Its placement after the opener starts to unfold the record’s map from interior to exterior.

Fine Whine This is a smoky interlude of longing. Featuring M.I.A., Future, and Joe Fox, the song is an exercise in texture more than in hard narrative. The production credits show smaller hands like THC and S.I.K. at work, and the arrangement leaves space for Fox’s vocal accents and Future’s stretched ad-libs. It is a record of appetite and contradiction. In the album’s running order it functions as a mood piece that rehearses the album’s willingness to mix pop, rap, and a sort of brittle soul.

L$D The single that many took as Rocky’s formal slide into psychedelia. Production credits include FNZ, Jim Jonsin, and Hector Delgado, and the track folds Steve Reich-like repetition into spaced synths and a slow pulse. Vocally Rocky moves between singing and rapping. The lyrics meditate on altered perception but do not flatten into cliché. The production treats the chorus as an island. The track reads as the album’s statement of aesthetic intent. It asks the listener to let go of genre expectations.

Excuse Me Another slow burner produced in part by the same team behind L$D, the song continues the album’s commitment to languid arrangements. The beat is skeletal. Rocky’s delivery is conversational and precise. The track exists as a connective tissue between momentary disorientation and sharper, more direct statements to follow. It underlines Rocky’s choice to use space as much as melody.

JD A brief cut that functions as a palate-cleanser. The credit to The Alchemist and Hector Delgado is telling. The track is terse. It is meant to pivot. It gives the album a different texture, a producer’s interlude that recalls earthen sampling even as it propels the record toward a harder edge. It keeps the listener alert.

Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye 2 (LPFJ2) One of the album’s clearest weapons. Produced by Nez & Rio, this is the song that announces Rocky’s return to raw bravado. The drums are militaristic. The siren-like synths cut through. Rocky’s flow is short and repeated. The track is lean and built for the arena. It functions as the record’s public face of aggression and persona. Sequenced here, it snaps the album out of its headier reverie and into a physical stance.

Electric Body A club-ready collaboration with ScHoolboy Q that lists Danger Mouse, THC, and Teddy Walton among contributors. The production is brighter and more propulsive than much of the record. Schoolboy Q provides counterpoint swagger. The song’s energy and placement expand the album’s range. It proves Rocky can still deliver a full-on rap-banger without collapsing the album’s mood.

Jukebox Joints A longer, meditative piece that features Joe Fox and Kanye West and credits Kanye West and Madlib in production. The track is a collage of smoke and memory. Kanye’s touch is in the shifts and the layering. Madlib’s sensibility gives it a crackling sample texture. Rocky uses the space to time his verses as if they were flashbacks. The song reads as a centerpiece. It is where the album’s competing impulses toward experimentation and classical rap poise meet.

Max B A cut that acts as a tribute and a meditation. Joe Fox appears. The production is attributed to Hector Delgado and Rocky. The lyrics reference visibility, incarceration, and the moral arithmetic of street life. The track folds homage into critique. It is an example of how Rocky uses named references to map both lineage and disquiet.

Pharsyde Produced by Danger Mouse with distinctive Spaghetti Western flavors and credited arrangements that emphasize wah-wah guitar and cinematic pacing. Joe Fox’s presence returns. The song takes on Uptown shifts and gentrification imagery. Rocky’s cadence becomes conversational again. The track expands the album’s landscape into an almost filmic geography. It is one of the most striking moments where production directly evokes place.

Wavybone A Southern-leaning cut with Juicy J and UGK that rides a rolling, syrupy groove. Production credits show Juicy J and DJ Burn One at work. The track is a throwback to chopped-syrup textures and Texas bounce. Placed in the middle section it reorients the album toward a cross-regional conversation. Rocky here plays conduit. He folds southern signifiers into the album’s larger frame without making them pastiche.

Westside Highway A quieter, more intimate track featuring James Fauntleroy and co-produced by Danger Mouse and Mark Ronson. The song is a small, cinematic vignette. Fauntleroy’s smoothness contrasts with Rocky’s more pointed lines. The production favors piano and soft percussion. This is one of the album’s tender moments. It suggests that Rocky wanted to marry popcraft with the record’s darker tendencies.

Better Things A short, reflective piece that pulls the record inward. The production credits on the album include veteran hands such as Bink! and Noah "40" Shebib in the larger credits list, and the track’s arrangement favors minimalism. Rocky’s voice here is quieter. The song reads as a moment of reckoning. It allows the album to breathe before it re-enters high-concept territory.

M'$ A streetwise, horn-sampling cut in which Rocky asserts wealth and position. The track features Lil Wayne on the version most listeners heard and lists Mike Dean, Hector Delgado, and Honorable C.N.O.T.E. among production credits. Its beat is tougher and more direct. In sequencing this track follows quieter pieces and acts as a reminder of the album’s core rap identity. It is ballast for the sides of the record that gravitate toward experimentation.

Dreams (Interlude) A small instrumental passage credited to Rocky and Frans Mernick. It functions as the album’s hinge before the climactic two tracks. The interlude’s ephemeral textures recall the record’s recurring psychedelic thread while preparing the listener for a finale that folds in older voices.

Everyday The surprising cross-generational centerpiece. Built around a sample of Python Lee Jackson that preserves Rod Stewart’s original vocal, the track features Miguel and a production team that includes Mark Ronson, Emile Haynie, Jeff Bhasker, and Hudson Mohawke. The result is a weary, soulful pop song with an undercurrent of nostalgia. Dan Auerbach’s guitar and the multi-producer layering give the track a widescreen sweep. Lyrically Rocky contemplates time and consequence. For many listeners this is the record’s most unexpected and ambitious turn.

Back Home The album’s closer and its gesture toward origin. Featuring Mos Def and members of the A$AP collective, it samples obscure soul and announces a familial voice in the outro from A$AP Yams. The closing sequence contains the line that sounds like a manifesto. Yams’ voice asserts, "We from Harlem, we gave y'all motherfuckers this wave." The track ends with a railcar sound effect that suggests movement away and away again. As a finale it folds the record into the idea of return and of responsibility.

The album’s sequencing is deliberate. It opens with invocation. It moves through private scenes and public pronouncements. It alternates surfacing bravado with interior moments. Rocky places louder tracks like "Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye 2" and "Electric Body" amid more experimental and sample-forward pieces to keep the listener off balance. The result is not a concept album in the narrow sense. It is instead a set of weather systems. The track order measures a day that begins with remembrance and ends with statement. The listener travels through mood, place, and persona. Each production shift feels like a different room in the same house.

AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP arrived in late May 2015 into a climate that was already listening closely. Critics responded with interest in the album’s range and texture. On aggregate sites the record registered generally favorable reviews and a Metacritic score in the mid 70s, reflecting praise for its ambition and some impatience with its sprawling tendencies. Reviews singled out Rocky’s improved command as an emcee and his willingness to incorporate eccentric collaborators. The record was read as a maturing move and as a risky one.

Commercially the album succeeded at once. After the early leak the label moved the street date to May 26, 2015. In its first week AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP moved approximately 146,000 equivalent album units and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with roughly 117,000 of those as pure album sales. That made it Rocky’s second consecutive number one album. The numbers signaled that the audience would follow him through stylistic detours.

Culturally the record mattered because it refused tidy classification. It pulled from British street singers, from Southern syrup, from Madlib’s crate-digging, and from Mark Ronson’s popcraft. Some listeners heard that as bravado. Others heard it as boundary testing. The presence of A$AP Yams in the credits and on the closing track gave the album an additional role as eulogy and as archive. Rocky had to balance mourning with market demands. The record’s public life was therefore split between its textures and its backstory.

Over the years the album’s influence has been visible in how rap artists allowed themselves to be more porous. The record’s combination of pitched vocals, rock samples, and cross-era features helped open mainstream space for rappers to work with unexpected collaborators without losing audience reach. Rocky’s comfort with mood and fashion as part of a musical identity also helped consolidate an era where aesthetic curation counted as a credible part of artistry. The album did not produce a single that eclipsed pop charts in the way some hoped. Instead it lodged itself as a signpost. It marked a moment when hip hop could sound both nostalgic and experimental while still topping the charts.