De La Soul are coming to Palace Foreshore later this month, supported by Oddisee & Good Compny and Miss Kaninna.
It’s been a long time coming, but De La Soul are finally returning to Melbourne for a headline show. The Long Island hip hop legends will top the bill at the Droppin’ Science hip hop celebration at Palace Foreshore on Friday 27 February.
Named after Marley Marl’s 1988 East Coast hip hop classic, Droppin’ Science is intended as a celebration of hip hop culture and the genre’s pioneers and trailblazers. De La Soul will be supported by contemporary jazz rap acolyte Oddisee, who’ll perform live with his band Good Compny, and Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung, Kalkadoon and Yirendali woman Miss Kaninna, one of the most exhilarating live performers anywhere on the planet.
Droppin’ Science starring De La Soul
- Friday 27 February
- Palace Foreshore, St Kilda
- Tickets here
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
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Last year, De La Soul pulled off the near-impossible: they released a long-awaited comeback album, their first since the death of founding member Trugoy the Dove, and it was met with universal acclaim.
Any artist releasing music in the fourth decade of their career will struggle to excite fans and critics. It’s an especially hard task for a group like De La Soul, whose first three albums – 1989’s 3 Feet High and Rising, 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead and 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate – aren’t just adored by their fanbase, but regarded as some of the most important releases in the hip hop canon.
The Long Island trio also featured on one of the most enduring songs of the 2000s, Gorillaz’s Feel Good Inc., further pinning them to an earlier era.
But when Cabin in the Sky, De La Soul’s ninth studio album, came out in November 2025 through Nas’ Mass Appeal label, critics and fans were united in their assessment: these hip hop lifers have not lost their magic touch.
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Trugoy, who founded De La Soul with fellow rappers and producers Posdnuos and Maseo in the late 1980s, passed away in February 2023, and Cabin in the Sky is partly a concept album about death and the afterlife. But it’s not a sombre affair.
Trugoy’s voice features on seven of the album’s tracks. There’s production from golden-age beat makers DJ Premier and Pete Rock, and guest vocals from Q-Tip, Nas, Killer Mike, Common, Slick Rick, Bilal and The Roots’ Black Thought. Across its 20-song, 70-minute runtime, the album finds De La Soul in typically high spirited and charmingly equable form.
In a four-star review, NME’s Fred Garratt-Stanley wrote, “this record isn’t bogged down by grief and nostalgia, but grounded in our current global reality with plenty of fresh, outward-facing reflection.” Clash magazine gave Cabin in the Sky an eight out of ten, with critic Robin Murray calling it “one of the most straight-forwardly enjoyable hip-hop albums 2025 has offered us”.
2023 was a bittersweet year for De La Soul’s two remaining members, Maseo and Posdnuos. On the one hand, there was the tragic passing of their band mate and brother, with who they co-founded De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island, in 1988, and went on to achieve global acclaim, tour the world many times over, and collaborate with everyone from Chaka Khan to the Beastie Boys, Tom Misch and Gorillaz (on both Feel Good Inc. and Superfast Jellyfish).
But on the other hand, they finally prevailed in a decade-long battle to get their music on streaming services. De La Soul’s first three albums are landmark releases in the field of soulful hip hop (an aesthetic the group dubbed “Daisy Age”). These records were made in partnership with producer Prince Paul, who put on a masterclass in plunderphonic beat making – that is, beats constructed from a wide array of samples.
Eye Know repurposed the guitar chords from Make This Young Lady Mine by The Mad Lads, the melodic hooks from Steely Dan’s Peg, and the whistled outro from Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay.
Me Myself and I borrowed the groove from Funkadelic’s (Not Just) Knee Deep. A Roller Skating Jam Named “Saturdays” took its disco intro from I Got My Mind Made Up (You Can Get It Girl) by Instant Funk. And The Magic Number – De La Soul’s unofficial group anthem – got its central refrain from the educational song Three Is a Magic Number by Bob Dorough.
The wide range of source material is central to the surrealistic and amusingly unpredictable character of De La Soul’s music. But for years, contract disputes meant that every De La Soul album up until 2004’s The Grind Date was missing from digital platforms. That finally changed in March 2023, with the digital release of De La Soul’s entire catalogue allowing a new generation of fans to discover the group’s era-defining music.
The high streaming numbers indicate younger fans have found much to love about De La Soul’s back catalogue, making their long-delayed return to Melbourne an even more anticipated event.
Speaking to The Guardian last year, Posdnuos explained the thinking behind the title of the De La Soul’s second album, De La Soul Is Dead.
“We meant it to indicate we were transferring to another plane, that we were metamorphosing into older kids,” he said. “We were just growing.”
35 years later, De La Soul are still metamorphosing, still growing, still pushing up their favourite daisies.
De La Soul, Oddisee & Good Compny and Miss Kaninna will perform at Palace Foreshore on Friday 27 February. Tickets here.
This article was made in partnership with Palace Foreshore.
