Black Messiah is the third studio album by recording artist D'Angelo, and the first credited to D'Angelo and the Vanguard. It was released on December 15, 2014, through RCA Records, bringing an end to his 14-year hiatus. The album debuted at number five on the U.S. Billboard charts, selling over 117,000 units in its first week. D'Angelo originally wanted to release Black Messiah in 2015, but the controversial decisions in the Ferguson and Eric Garner cases inspired him to release it earlier. Black Messiah received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, it received an average score of 95, based on 30 reviews. In a rave review for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield hailed the album as an experimental soul masterpiece, and it was voted the best album of 2014 in the Pazz & Jop, an annual critics poll run by The Village Voice.