Bad Meets Evil Is Not Over: Denaun Porter Says the Only Thing in the Way Is Royce's Voice

Fifteen years of "maybe one day" answers, and then somebody finally named the actual obstacle.

A viewer paid to ask Denaun Porter a question on The 3rd Verse Podcast: what stopped another Bad Meets Evil project? Seems like a win for everyone.

He did not do the usual dance.

Denaun Porter: "Well, I mean, recently, Royce obviously is having voice issues. That's something that's happening, and we working through that. But I'm quite certain that once we figure that out, we could possibly get that. It's always something that can happen. It's not like he's not around. We all talk every day."

Set to start at 3:16:04. The answer runs about forty seconds.

Two things in there matter. "We working through that" is a first-person plural from the man who executive produced the only Bad Meets Evil album. And "we all talk every day" closes off the assumption most people default to, which is that the silence means a falling out.

What the voice issue actually is

Denaun is referring to something Royce has already made public himself. In a Rolling Stone interview published in November 2025, Royce da 5'9" disclosed that he had been living with lingual dystonia, a neurological condition that causes involuntary movement in the tongue and facial muscles.

In his own account, his cranial nerves and vagus nerve were inflamed, and a variant of the COMT gene left him processing dopamine more slowly than normal, producing symptoms he described as Parkinson's-like. He was misdiagnosed more than once before anyone named it. For a period it was hard to speak, let alone record.

His own summary at the time was "I'm almost through it," offered while he was executive producing a posthumous Big L album and wishing out loud that he had been able to record during it.

Set Denaun's update against that and the picture is consistent: a recovery still in progress, being handled by people who speak daily, with a project waiting on the other side of it. That is a very different sentence from "Bad Meets Evil is done."

The one album, and what it cost to make

Bad Meets Evil has existed since 1998. The name first appeared as a song on The Slim Shady LP in 1999. The only project under it is Hell: The Sequel, released June 14, 2011, which entered the Billboard 200 at number one.

"Fast Lane," the lead single, June 2011. Fifteen years and counting as the last Bad Meets Evil single.

Earlier in the same interview, Denaun is asked what stands out about making it. His answer reframes the record entirely.

Denaun Porter: "Everything that happened in the background was just young kid dumb stuff. So it was kind of easy after we grew up and were acting like men to get past it. Royce at that time was still going through his sobriety journey and he hadn't even started it yet. So he was back around, but he couldn't even be all the way present, because he was still battling that."

Then the detail nobody had.

Denaun Porter: "People don't know it, but one time we thought we was about to lose him. Had he took one more drink, it was really bad at one point. We were on tour. I remember being on tour and the doctor told him, he was like, man, if you take one more drink, you're out of here."

Royce has been open for years about getting sober in 2012, the year after Hell: The Sequel. Denaun's version places the medical warning during the touring cycle for the album itself. He also declines to go further, which is the right instinct: "I let him tell it."

He adds one forward-looking note: "He's working on some things right now where you'll hear a lot about that."

Why the reunion keeps not happening

Denaun's other comment about the 2011 sessions explains the fifteen-year gap better than any beef theory. The album was not a reunion for its own sake. It was strategic.

Denaun Porter: "We did that album because it would have alley-ooped Slaughterhouse. It would have been a great alley-oop. During that time we was just looking for, it wasn't nothing in the direction that we was trying to go in. We was just happy to be back in the same room."

Slaughterhouse signed to Shady Records in January 2011 and never released the album that was supposed to follow. The setup outlived the play it was set up for. Since then, a second Bad Meets Evil record has had no obvious slot to fill, which is a duller reason than a feud but a much more likely one.

What has changed is that the person who would produce it just said, on camera, that the group is a live option and named the single condition. Royce says he is almost through it. Denaun says they talk every day.

Sources. Denaun Porter's quotes are from "Producer Denaun Porter Joins The 3rd Verse Podcast, Full Interview," posted September 10, 2026. The Bad Meets Evil superchat answer sits at 3:16:04; the Hell: The Sequel recollection runs from 1:47:05 to about 1:49:20. Royce da 5'9"'s lingual dystonia disclosure comes from his own Rolling Stone interview, reported November 2025; the medical details above are his description of his own diagnosis, not ours. Hell: The Sequel was released June 14, 2011 on Shady, Aftermath and Interscope and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Slaughterhouse signed to Shady Records in January 2011. Neither Royce nor Eminem has commented on a second Bad Meets Evil project since this interview.