No ID & Saba Drop 'From The Private Collection of Saba and No ID' Joint Album

RIAA gold-selling Chicago rap virtuoso and Pivot Gang leader Saba and GRAMMY® Award-winning super-producer and the “Godfather of Chicago Hip-Hop” No ID release their powerhouse joint album, From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID via ARTium Recordings/Pivot Gang Records, LLC.

Earning early praise from Complex, Vulture, HipHopDX, Brooklyn Vegan, and more, From the Private Collection is indisputably one of the most anticipated releases of 2025. The union of these hip-hop heavyweights evolved from an initial mixtape to an expansive 15-song project, resulting in a record that will resonate with rap fans across generations.    

For Saba and No ID, the process of making From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID was long, involved, and not always linear. Beginning life as a mixtape, it entailed mountains of demos, months of reconsideration, and even a hard reset. Yet when the time came to push the button, there was no hesitation. From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID is the sort of record rap fans across generations adore: technically dazzling but thematically dense, irresistibly kinetic even as it dives deep into Saba’s psyche. A year ago, the duo thought they were finished with the project, but Saba losing his uncle forced him to reevaluate. “He’s the person who made me fall in love with hip-hop,” Saba says. “It made me want to re-approach things; I had to have a lot of conversations with myself that I hadn’t had to have in a long time.”

From the buoyant opener “Every Painting Has A Price” to the playful “Breakdown,” “Woes of the World” and its elastic flow to the way “head.rap” effortlessly spins hair into a metaphor for the passage of time, the album is teeming with style and wit, and with No ID’s inimitable chops. The beat on “Big Picture” is the ideal underline to Saba’s extended photography motif, seeming to give each line the combination of naturalism and nostalgia that defines the best images. Or see the brief “Reciprocity Interlude,” a hypnotic enough beat to serve as the spine of most major albums. 

Both Saba and No ID believe that the way to build a legacy—one that honors what came before while forging new ground—is to worry about being as honest as possible in the moment, and let questions of posterity sort themselves out later.  “To be able to have a real career, you have to reinvent your thought process, reinvent your perspective,” No ID explains. “And you can’t do it sitting on the mountaintop, yelling about what you did. You think you know—and then everything changes.”   

In the midst of working on the project, the two artists earned a number of notable individual accomplishments. Earlier in 2024, Saba released “Don’t Check 4 Me,” with Nascent and Duckworth, right after hopping on Valee and Harry Fraud’s “Watermelon Automobile.” Meanwhile, No ID has continued to solidify his status as one of the most influential producers in the game, co-producing “American Requiem” from Beyoncé’s latest cultural phenomenon COWBOY CARTER alongside Jon Batiste and a plethora of genius hitmakers. He also executive produced Killer Mike’s sixth studio album MICHAEL, snagging a Best Rap Song GRAMMY Award for his work on “Scientists & Engineers.”

About No ID:

Super-producer, songwriter, and sometimes exec No ID (aka Dion Wilson) earned the sobriquet “Godfather of Chicago Hip-Hop” due to his early work with—and mentorship of—Kanye West and other Windy City icons. But he's also helmed Grammy-winning work by Jay-Z and Nas and collaborated with the likes of Drake, Rihanna, John Mayer, Ed Sheeran, J. Cole, Killer Mike, Big Sean, Common, and Bow Wow. He ran West’s G.O.O.D. Music Label and was EVP & Head of A&R at Def Jam while running his own imprint, ARTium Recordings (which has since gone independent). Under the leadership of No ID, ARTium has served as the home for breakout stars including Jhené Aiko and Snoh Aalegra.

About Saba:

A successful independent artist, Saba has rooted his career in an authenticity and musicality that’s made him one of his generation’s most important and unique voices in rap. Saba’s most recent career highlights include performing at the United Center arena for Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap Anniversary, playing two weekends at Coachella, and touring the US, Europe and Africa in support of his album Few Good Things. This year, Spotify named Saba’s critically acclaimed CARE FOR ME album amongst its “Spotify Classics: Hip-Hop & R&B Albums of the Streaming Era” campaign (which includes Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Tyler the Creator and more) with billboards across LA and NYC. 

Saba began making music at age 9 and was writing and producing songs by early adolescence. Building a recording studio in his grandmother’s basement on the west side of Chicago, he and a group of neighborhood friends formed their Pivot Gang collective. In 2019, J. Cole tapped Saba for the Dreamville collaboration album Revenge of the Dreamers III, in which Saba earned his first RIAA Gold certification for the song “Sacrifices.” That same year, Saba, Noname, and Smino announced the creation of their Midwest super-group Ghetto Sage with the release of their debut track “Häagen Dazs.” 2022 marked Saba’s second RIAA Gold certification – this time for his own 2016 single “Photosynthesis.”

Photo credit: Laiken Joy