A Third Installment to De La Soul’s AOI Series Is Coming

Maseo said the next De La Soul project will be the third album in the Art Official Intelligence series.

De La Soul has no plans of slowing down. Less than one month after the trio’s back catalog officially hit DSPs, group member Maseo recently visited the Kyle Meredith With… podcast, where he teased a third installment of their Art Official Intelligence or (AOI) series.

“AOI 3 is definitely going to to take precedent,” Maseo said about De La Soul’s upcoming plans. “It’s going to be the very next thing. That’s a responsibility that we have to our fans — a responsibility we even have to ourselves — with completing that trilogy… We have a responsibility to continue on just to sustain [Trugoy’s] legacy and what we’ve built as three childhood friends, and we have a responsibility to hip-hop.”

Maseo, legal name Vincent Mason, said that material on the upcoming AOI 3 was largely recorded before Trugoy’s passing, but will also contain new music. The group’s first two installments, Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump and AOI: Bionix, released in 2000 and 2001, respectively.

“A lot of stuff is fresh,” he said. “There’s a couple of ideas I had been sitting on for a while. Nothing had lyrics on it,” Mason added. “The stuff that had lyrics on it, we already kind of leaked it. That was ‘The Return of DST,’ the Chuck D record, ‘The People.’ The other one that we leaked was [‘Get Away,’], we used the Wu-Tang sample.”

He added, “Those three records pretty much were supposed to be a part of AOI 3. And then there’s another record that was done that we haven’t released, but I’m gonna put it on the record because it holds up. It’s a song called ‘Rise’ that we have with Yummy [Bingham]. It has a real disco rollerskating vibe, and I think that’s gonna fit really nice.”

Listen to Maseo’s full interview here.