Madvillainy is the only studio album by American hip hop duo Madvillain, consisting of rapper MF Doom and producer Madlib. It was released on March 23, 2004, on Stones Throw Records.

The album was recorded between 2002 and 2004. Madlib created most of the instrumentals during a trip to Brazil in his hotel room using minimal amounts of equipment: a Boss SP-303 sampler, a turntable, and a tape deck. Fourteen months before the album was released, an unfinished demo version was stolen and leaked onto the internet. Frustrated, the duo stopped working on the album and returned to it only after they had released other solo projects.

While Madvillainy achieved only moderate commercial success, it became one of the best-selling Stones Throw albums. It peaked at number 179 on the US Billboard 200, and attracted attention from media outlets not usually covering hip hop music, including The New Yorker. Madvillainy received widespread critical acclaim for Madlib’s production and MF Doom’s lyricism, and is regarded as Doom’s magnum opus. It has ranked in various publications’ lists of all-time greatest albums, including at 411 on NME’s list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, at 365 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and at 18 on Rolling Stone’s 200 Greatest Hip-Hop Albums of All Time.

Madvillainy was produced almost entirely by Madlib, except the first track, which he produced in collaboration with Doom. On the album, Madlib incorporates his distinctive production style, based on using samples,[18] mostly obscure, from albums recorded in different countries. Aside from sampling records by American artists, namely from jazz and soul, Madlib also used Indian (for example, “Shadows of Tomorrow” samples “Hindu Hoon Main Na Musalman Hoon” by R. D. Burman) and Brazilian records (“Curls” samples “Airport Love Theme” by Waldir Calmon) for Madvillainy. In regards to Madlib’s production on the album, he stated in an interview:

I did most of the Madvillain album in Brazil. Cuts like “Raid” I did in my hotel room in Brazil on a portable turntable, my 303, and a little tape deck. I recorded it on tape, came back here, put it on CD, and Doom made a song out of it.

The album consists of 22 songs, most of which are under 3 minutes and contain no hooks or choruses. Sam Samuelson of AllMusic compared the album to a comic book, “sometimes segued with vignettes sampled from 1940s movies and broadcasts or left-field [marijuana]-toting skits”. He also noted that some instrumentals on the album “[seem] to be so out of time or step with a traditional hip-hop direction”. The A.V. Club compared the album to a buffet, where “Madlib and Doom are interested in throwing out ideas as fast as they have them, giving them as much attention as they need, and moving on to the next thing”. Tim O’Neil of PopMatters praised Madlib’s instrumentals and said that they “make the album a sonic feast”.