2009: the year Eminem declared he was “back”
Looking back now, 2004’s Encore clearly represents the end of an era for Eminem.
That album had come off the back of a string of incredible successes, beginning with The Slim Shady LP in 1999, followed by The Marshall Mathers LP the following year, and The Eminem Show arriving in 2002, with his hugely successful film 8 Mile being released late that same year. All of these projects were critically acclaimed and successful with the public, but Encore represented a clear dip.
It took Eminem some time to recover from that. He was dealing with addiction issues around this time, and it led, ultimately, to him taking a career break. For five years he didn’t release any new albums, suffering from a bad writer’s block.
During that time, Em’s friend Proof was shot and killed, which badly affected Em and caused him to relapse back into addiction. He later admitted to XXL that Proof’s death forced him “into such a dark place… with everything, the drugs, my thoughts, everything.”
By 2009, though, he was ready to step back into the ring. He had started to overcome his addiction and his writer’s block, and he soon had an album’s worth of material. The album, in the end, was Relapse.
While he was promoting the new album, Em was keen to stress that, after a fallow period in which he’d struggled with his health, he was now back and eager to return to his previous heights. He claimed to Rolling Stone in 2009 that he was “running a lot,” to the extent that he considered himself to be “a little obsessive compulsive about running and the treadmill.”
Em was giving the impression of a man raring to get back to the top of the rap scene, and he believed his return was going to be good for everyone. “Hip-hop will be in a great place,”he said, “because I am back.”
Relapse was released on May 15, 2009, and it initially split critics. The accents that Eminem deployed in it were a big source of criticism, but the production tended to be a particular point of praise. There was a sense that people didn’t know what to make of it, but, eventually, Relapse has come to be recognised as one of Em’s better albums.
Em has continued to release music since that time, with albums arriving in 2010, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2024. He’s had some breaks during that run, but, generally speaking, he’s remained prolific, and hasn’t ever stepped out of the limelight for as long as he did between Encore and Relapse. He was telling the truth in 2009, then. He really had come back.