Hi, everyone. Yathony Ahtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Mobb Deep album, Infinite.

Game-changing New York hip hop duo Mobb Deep is back with their ninth and final full-length album. Produced by both Havoc and The Alchemist. Now, this record is essentially one more example of the dreaded posthumous album in a sense, since obviously the album features vocals from the late great Mobb Deep co-founder Prodigy, who passed away in 2017.

Even though these sorts of albums tend to, much of the time, disappoint or undergo a lot of extra scrutiny, personally, I think an album like this from Mobb Deep at this point is an interesting prospect. With it being 2025, you definitely can't accuse Havoc and The Alchemist of rushing this thing out because certainly the best time to capitalize on this sort of thing would have been 2018-2019. So after all this time and with all this lead-up to the point where we are getting this album now, I would think there is at least some essential material on this thing.

On top of it, from the descriptions of this record we have gotten from Havoc and The Alchemist. It does sound like they've put a lot of thought and time into this record, like really a lot of focus and care into what these songs were going to be, what they were going to say. With Havoc and Alc essentially working off of and writing around many of the central ideas in the verses that Prodigy had left with us.

So it really was like Havoc was doing his best to collaborate with Prodigy as best he could. It sounds like the verses came from a variety of different places, too, some of which were on beats that worked for this album. Others got changed around, shifted onto other instrumentals, or placed in other contexts. Apparently, some of Prodigy's verses came from his family and estate as well.

So again, it does sound like cumulatively, Havoc and Alchemist have put years of effort into making this tracklist and making these songs come together seamlessly as well as cohesively. I feel like, at this point in Mobb Deep's legacy, I wouldn't say the duo has undergone a critical reassessment, as they've been seen as one of the most classic groups to come out of New York ever for a very, very, very long time.

But it is the case that a lot of different publications have pulled together all-time lists of hip hop singles, albums, groups, and beats. Often these days you do see Mobb Deep either landing at number one or somewhere in the top 10. So there really is a lot of Mobb Deep love and appreciation going around right now, with a lot of their back catalog aging like fine wine.

And I'm sure Havoc and Alchemist want this album to live up to that standard as much as it possibly can. In addition to that, I thought this record had a pretty respectable features list as well. You've got guys who obviously have a really big and deep history with Mobb Deep, be it Big Noyd, Nas, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon "The Chef", and Clipse is in the mix, too. You also have one song we get two versions of with vocal features from Jorja Smith as well as H.E.R..

It's after all of that description that I say, Infinite is actually a pretty surprising album because despite the fact that Prodigy's verses and vocal bits are from a variety of different places and were obviously not intended for an album like this when they were originally written and recorded, I presume. This record, lyrically and topically, is about as focused and cohesive as you would want it to be and is actually a very respectable addition to the Mobb Deep catalog.

You get a really slick, laidback, charismatic killer opening track with "Against The World", which features chill beats, soul chops, and cold-blooded rhymes from both Prodigy and Havoc. The song "Down For You" that I was talking about earlier features both Jorja Smith and H.E.R., depending on which version you're listening to. And yes, of course, I love their contributions to the track, the very dour chord progression, the chilly atmosphere, the reverb, and the production. But what I love most about this track are the thoughtful and thorough verses from Havoc and Prodigy describing love and desire and the things that make attraction to the fairer sex so beautiful and alluring and exciting and amazing.

But simultaneously, they're also addressing a darkness there as well. They portray this love, they portray this attraction as something almost like an addiction or something that you feel powerless in the face of because of how much it can take over your mind, your emotions, everything.

We also have "Mr. Magik", which I thought was a great lyrical highlight on the album. With a title like this, you might think this song is maybe going to be playful, cute, and in a way, I suppose it is the former. But it's actually a very nasty and hilariously dark song about how you're going to make someone physically disappear, murder them with bars and refrains about how you're going to make someone disappear like a magic trick. Witty and funny trades between Prodigy and Havoc, going on about how Criss Angel and David Blaine are his sons, [and] "I make your body float when I throw you in the Hudson."

Deeper into the album, there are tracks that are really, really, really enhanced by how eerie and haunting some of The Alchemists' production touches are. Tracks like "Score Points", which directly address these feelings of trauma and paranoia that one may be overcome with when they've seen friends of theirs killed, die tragic deaths.

There's something honestly foreboding about Prodigy's vocals on the song "My Era", a track that is very much about Mobb Deep and other artists' lasting legacies within hip hop. But the way his voice sounds on this song, not just the lyrics, but how bellowing and deep his voice sounds, and the reverb effects on it at some points. He comes across like the ghost of hip hop past.

And going deeper into the production as well. I mean, it's very much a pro, very much a positive for this album, generally. Though it is maybe a bit of a double-edged sword. I mean, in true Alchemist fashion, there is something like very vintage and rough around the edges and like raw and underground, the way a lot of the beats on this record sound.

It's a very modern presentation of how we perceive underground hip hop to sound. It's not exactly like a complete and accurate representation or recreation of the earliest works of Mobb Deep or anything like that when it comes to the instrumentals. Between the loops and some of the fuzzy mastering and weird vocal EQs here and there, you have a lot of very familiar Alchemist trademarks when it comes to the way some of these tracks are produced.

A lot of the beats on this thing are simple, they're moody, they're evocative, occasionally cinematic too. But sometimes these beats and the way they're mastered and the way the vocals are EQ'd here and there, it's so rough around the edges. It does feel like maybe this could have gotten another pass, especially in the case of tracks like "Gunfire", where the vocals really overpower the instrumental.

And weirdly, "Look at Me", which features Clipse – this would be a track that you would think you'd really want to nail the mixing on and have it sound really clean, when this track actually ends up being one of the most narrow and thin-sounding songs on the entire record. The bass, especially on this track, sounds absolutely squeezed into such a narrow frequency range. Still, with that being said, the lyrical contributions of everyone on this track are fantastic, along with pretty much every other song on the album.

I mean, if anything really is the selling point of this record, it is the verses, it is the bars. It is, again, the cohesiveness that Havoc is able to strike up with Prodigy's leftover verses. But even with this album sounding as effectively collaborative as it is, it still doesn't prevent the final moments of the tracklist from feeling a little all over the place. The album overall still does come across a little bit like a compilation. Esthetically, it's definitely not the most cohesive Mobb Deep album out there for sure.

But given how good the writing and the choruses and the features are across this LP. Havoc and Alchemist have still managed to come through with one of the best tracklists we have heard on a Mobb Deep project in years, really, since Murda Muzik and Hell on Earth. And given the conditions under which this album was created, that's actually a pretty impressive feat, which is why I'm feeling a decent to strong 7 on this record.

Anthony Fantano, Mobb Deep, Forever.