The five best Wu-Tang Clan solo albums
When members of a much-loved band begin to release solo records, it often signifies that all is not well within the group. Perhaps relationships have begun to fray, and individual members feel that they need to go their own way to thrive. But that is decidedly not true of the Wu-Tang Clan.
After their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) was released in 1993, life was sweet for the Wu-Tang members. They’d just collectively created a genuinely novel record that instantly garnered respect—a remarkable achievement for a collective bearing so many members. To all pull in the same direction, and to produce a work of such high quality together, was a uniquely impressive feat. But only a year later, things were already beginning to move on.
RZA founded a new group, Gravediggaz, in 1994, releasing an album that year, while Method Man released a solo album only months later—marking the first time that a Wu-Tang member had gone solo following 36 Chamber’s success. Ordinarily, this might have spelt the end for a group, but this was all part of the plan. RZA was a key force behind Method Man’s album, and he would remain a pivotal force on subsequent Wu-Tang solo records. These albums didn’t signify the end of the collective, but rather added to the group’s wider discography. Wu-Tang endured and thrived.
In addition to the group’s six albums as a collective—plus a controversial seventh album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which very few people have ever actually heard—the Wu-Tang members have released dozens of albums, and that’s to say nothing of mixtapes and the hundreds of records released by Wu affiliates. It can be an overwhelming endeavour to make sense of the expanded Wu-Tang discography, but, first things first, there are at least five must-listens among the solo releases.
The five best Wu-Tang Clan solo albums
5. Ol’ Dirty Bastard – Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version
The creation of Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version is said to have been a fretful affair. Initially intended to be the first of the Wu-Tang solo albums, it actually proved to be the second—because its main man was too erratic to stick to a schedule. ODB would apparently disappear during the album’s production, even walking out in the middle of recording sessions, only to reappear days later, sometimes in a drunken, agitated state. All the while, the record’s more meticulous producer, RZA, tried to keep the project together.
Return to the 36 Chambers was released in 1995, and, despite the album’s troubles behind the scenes, it was a hit. For RZA, who reflected on the project in a conversation with Flood magazine in 2020, his cousin ODB’s energy was a key part of what made it great. “He was about capturing spontaneous combustion,” RZA noted. “That was part of his delivery, part of the entertainment, and part of his energy… It was actually his comfort, his confidence and knowing that he himself was the vehicle of art that had an attractive power. He says it in the song ‘Raw Hide.’”
4. Ghostface Killah – Supreme Clientele
After Wu-Tang released their second album, Wu-Tang Forever, in 1997, RZA decided that he wanted to delegate production duties on Wu-Tang projects to others. But the one member with whom he definitely wanted to work closely was Ghostface Killah, who needed a follow-up to his debut solo album Ironman. The pair started recording a new album in 1998, with several Wu-Tang members contributing, but the project was delayed when Ghostface was sent to jail for six months. In the end, the album, Supreme Clientele, was released in 2000.
While he was writing towards the end of 1997, Ghostface Killah visited Africa for a stretch, which really influenced his process. He moved away from the more materialistic themes of his first album, explaining to The Source that he felt inspired in Africa to focus on the more important things in life. “Fuck all this Tommy Hilfiger, Polo, all this shit,” he said. “They don’t give a fuck about none of that in Africa… But over here, everybody wanna be better than the next one. Nah, it’s not like that over there. They might be fucked up moneywise, but trust me, them motherfuckers is happy. Them n—as in harmony because they got each other.”
3. Method Man – Tical
Method Man’s Tical served as the template for what the wider Wu-Tang project was all about. This was the first of the post-36 Chambers solo albums to be released, arriving into the world in late 1994 via Def Jam Recordings, and it boasted many of the characteristics that we would see in the releases that followed. It was produced by RZA, naturally, and it featured a long list of both official Wu-Tang members and of the group’s affiliates. This album, following the success of 36 Chambers, was proof of the wider Wu-Tang concept.
While Ol’ Dirty Bastard had initially been intended to be the first of the Wu-Tang solo artists, it probably worked out better that it was Method Man. He was arguably the group’s most popular member during these early days, so there was a great deal of excitement surrounding his first release. It was ultimately a big success, which meant that the other members—some of whom were a little bit less accessible than Meth, in terms of their style—were able to do what they wanted to do. Without Tical proving how good these albums could be, maybe the other Wu-Tang projects wouldn’t have been quite so attractive for people.
2. Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…
Otherwise known as The Purple Tape, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… was Raekwon’s first solo album and the third of the Wu-Tang solo records. Released in 1995, it was structured like a movie, with Raekwon serving as its star, Ghostface Killah as its guest star, a host of other Wu-Tang members and affiliates as cast members, and, obviously, RZA as its director. But, in terms of its content, this “movie” wasn’t a kung-fu flick, as might have been expected from a Wu-Tang member, but was rather a hard-hitting gangster feature.
In an interview with music journalist Angus Batey in 2007, Raekwon revealed how his upbringing had shaped the album. While he hadn’t exactly been a full-on crime kingpin, he was involved in low-level crime as a way to get by. “Just growin’ up the streets, sellin’ drugs, tryin’ to make money to buy sneakers an’ shit like that,” he noted. “I wasn’t infatuated with the mafia, I was more infatuated with the mafia principles. I felt like we had a mafia growin’ up in the neighbourhood—we was our own mafia. We felt like it was a code o’ silence that you had to live by if you was considered a crew.”
1. GZA – Liquid Swords
Sessions for Liquid Swords got underway in the middle of 1995, at the height of the Wu-Tang’s popularity. 36 Chambers was already legendary by this point, while Method Man and ODB had received a great deal of acclaim for their RZA-produced solo albums. Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… was on the way, and things, really, were going incredibly well for the group and its many members. So, wanting to strike while the iron was hot, GZA and RZA started work on Liquid Swords. It would prove to be just as good, if not better, than all the Wu-Tang projects that preceded it.
Much of Liquid Swords’ success can be traced to the musical chemistry of cousins RZA and GZA. As the latter revealed in a 2008 interview with Angus Batey, there was a looseness to their sessions that left space for last-minute sparks of creativity. That’s how audio from the kung-fu movie Shogun Assassin came to feature so prominently on the record. “We were masterin’ the album, and [RZA] sent one o’ the assistants out, an’ he said, ‘Go get me the Shogun Assassin.’ Last minute! He went an’ got that movie, an’ that’s where all those skits came out. So you see the chemistry between myself and RZA.”