Goddess Missy Elliott Will Soon Bless Us with New Music

The world desperately needs joy, and our goddess Missy Elliott is delivering. The iconic rapper is making a comeback and has been teasing some of her new music on Twitter, revealing her latest song on Thursday afternoon.

The track, called “High,” proves that Elliott has not only retained her vocal abilities through the years, but plans to flex them on her new project.

Forty-seven-year-old Elliott is a hip-hop pioneer, with highly conceptual music videos and an unconventional aesthetic that challenged patriarchal perceptions of beauty in the 1990s. She’s also written and produced for tons of artists, including Aaliyah, Beyoncé, Ciara, Mariah Carey, Monica, Mya, and Jazmine Sullivan.

Elliott’s last album, The Cookbook, came out in 2005. Its biggest single, “Lose Control,” won a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video. But in the years following, the rapper, who suffers from Graves disease, took a hiatus because of her health.

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“I was sick and I couldn’t even lift a pen,” she said during Essence’s 9th Annual Women in Music event where she was honored in January. “My nervous system had broken all the way down. I didn’t come up in here in a wheelchair. Nobody helped me get up here. I’m walking… by the grace of God.”

In early October, Elliott shared on Twitter that her reluctance to put out new music since has been partially because of how the industry has changed.

“For so long I was hesitant to put out music in fear no [one] would get it because people said music has changed and my sound been so different,” she wrote. “But now I’m like, ‘hey bump it’ make music that feels good to me —let me get y’all asses dancing again.”

In July, Elliott graced the remix to Ciara’s summer hit “Level Up” along with Fatman Scoop. The uptempo club song, which she recently performed with Ciara at the American Music Awards, proves, once again, that Elliott still has the goods. New music from her can’t come soon enough.

Correction: A previous version of this article had the incorrect title for Elliott’s 2005 album The Cookbook.