During a 2008 interview, Prodigy of Mobb Deep was asked whether he feared death. Mortality nipped at P’s heels on every verse he rapped, and few could better elicit the chill that settles into your bones when life-or-death stakes loom over everything you do. Naturally, his answer reflected that steely resolve, forced onto him by the battlefields of Queensbridge: “Every day I wake up like, ‘This might be my last day, and I’m not scared of it.’ I’m never scared to bite my tongue about something, or to come out and speak about something. Like, I ain’t scared of death. What you gonna do to me?”
Nine years later, at age 42, he passed away in a tragic, oddly banal way: While on tour with bandmate Havoc in Las Vegas, he was hospitalized with complications from his lifelong struggle with sickle cell anemia; there, he choked while eating unsupervised and died. (His family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the hospital.)
Havoc spent years grieving the loss of his bandmate and brother-in-arms and juggled how, and whether, to pay musical tribute to him. “You wanna do something to send your comrade off with a 21-gun salute…because he deserves that,” he recently said during an appearance on the Bootleg Kev podcast. With help from longtime affiliate the Alchemist, Havoc put together Infinite, Mobb Deep’s ninth album and the latest in Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It series. It’s the first posthumous release of the bunch, which inevitably brings its own complications. But Infinite is as seamless as projects like this get. For better and for worse, it plays like an album the duo might’ve released after 2014’s largely forgettable double LP The Infamous Mobb Deep, an update to the pair’s trademark sinister sound with a few nagging modern flourishes.
On paper, every dial imaginable has been set back. Outside of a stray COVID mention and a dumb Havoc bar about getting canceled for joking about someone’s chromosomes, references are either era-specific (“Taj Mahal” is named for the formerly Trump-owned casino) or universal enough to not matter. Instead of the stable of producers behind Infamous, Havoc handles 11 of the album’s 15 beats, with Alchemist embracing his grimy Murda Muzik and Infamy roots on the other four.
The best Havoc beats from Mobb Deep’s prime took familiar sounds and bent them into menacing shapes. Here, tracks like “The M. The O. The B. The B.” and “Mr. Magik” mix that menace with the muted drum patterns he used on Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, giving the low-end even more depth. Alchemist, for his part, falls back on the style that made him famous—all gutter drums and echoing samples. The glitzy fuzz of “Taj Mahal,” in particular, sounds like it was pulled off a lesser-known Street Sweepers mixtape, while “Score Points” and “My Era” wouldn’t sound out of place on his collaborative albums with Prodigy.
Prodigy has no halfway appearances, either; he has at least one verse on every song, and does the hooks for a chunk of them. P’s delivery is as curt and chilling as ever (“RIP, you can’t son me/My pop’s dead,” he deadpans on “My Era”), even when his writing treads well-worn ground. There were seams to tighten and holes to fill, but Havoc and Alchemist handle his vocals with care. Most importantly, Havoc and Prodigy’s chemistry remains intact. Neither has ever been a particularly showy writer or lyrical gymnast—their respective appeal comes from their pugilist directness and the way their personalities stayed burrowed deep in the cement of Queensbridge, no matter how high their stars ascended. In this sense, “Mr. Magik” gets the closest to vintage Mobb Deep, particularly when the two trade the mic every few bars to go in on their enemies while dodging CIA agents and laying up with mistresses. The same could be said for the shuffling “Easy Bruh,” anchored by a drum break, faint keys, sirens, and the tightest Prodigy raps on the whole album (“Niggas mad? Put a cape on ’em/Now they super mad” got a good laugh out of me). At its best, Infinite feels effortless in a way Mobb Deep hasn’t for years, the pair comfortable in their older, wearier skin.
Things veer off course when the arrangements get too ambitious or trend-chasey. Some of the guests throughout are no-brainers, like unofficial third member Big Noyd bruising through “The M. The O. The B. The B.” in all his mid-range nasal glory, or longtime foils Ghostface and Raekwon showing up to color in the margins over some fire beat switches on “Clear Black Nights.” But the Clipse’s addition to “Look at Me” feels like a fashionable feature more than a genuine connection, and Nas, another longtime collaborator, stops in to give his friends the same assembly-line Mass Appeal-mandated verses he’s been using on his recent albums. “Down For You,” a love song that turns Samuel Barber’s classical arrangement "Adagio for Strings” into a head-knocking groove, is a solid addition to the Mobb Deep love canon. But it’s less effective when it shows up again near the album’s end, with new verses and the Jorja Smith hook swapped out for one by H.E.R. I kinda get it, the beat’s hard—but hard enough to entertain Nas talking about keeping a goomar like Tony Soprano with a straight face? It’s one of only a handful of moments that feel shoehorned in just to fill up space, but their rarity makes them more egregious.
Many a recent posthumous rap release, especially in the last decade, has been marred by uncomfortable conversations about agency and exploitation. Thankfully, Infinite doesn’t contain any of the unresolved interpersonal beef tainting much of Gang Starr’s One of The Best Yet, and it isn’t the poorly stitched-together rap Frankenstein that was DMX’s Exodus. It doesn’t scan as Havoc and company robbing the grave for a quick cash grab, and it genuinely warms the heart to hear him and Prodigy go back and forth again, even if it’s hard not to wince a bit hearing Prodigy constantly mulling over his mortality: predicting his death while “staring up at the cosmos” on “Pour The Henny” and ducking enemies, both real and imagined, even while he’s running up slot machines in Atlantic City. Still, most of these unearthed and reconstructed songs feel like retreads of the duo’s greatest hits. There are no moments in the same area code of The Infamous or Hell on Earth. But Infinite is a decent stab at giving one of the greatest rap duos of all time one last trip around the block.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated which residential area was closely related to Mobb Deep. It is Queensbridge, not LeFrak City.
