Today, Mobb Deep dropped “Against The World,” the group’s first release since the death of Prodigy, who died at age 42 in 2017. The single is the first offering from their upcoming album Infinite, set to release on October 10 as the latest project in Mass Appeal Records’ Legend Has It series. Prodigy’s voice opens the song by powerfully stating, “stronger than ever, I’m back nigga,” priming listeners for a long-awaited dose of new music.
The track melds bluesy trumpet play with a wailing sample, embodying classic Mobb Deep sonics as Prodigy boasts of the Mobb’s “global dominance,” and rhymes, “all my fallen soldiers remind me to bring my gun, bring my blade.” After his verse, he hyperbolically menaces, “nigga I just bought four plastic rocket launchers,” refreshing listeners with his hyperbolic, one-of-one mic presence. Havoc follows up the track with an intricate verse where he raps, “good there and you not though, lie, got your spot blown / you the reason why the cops know what the cops know.”
“This one feels like coming full circle,” Havoc says of the song. “It’s that classic Mobb energy — dark, real, unfiltered. The sound that shaped who we are but also speaks to where hip-hop is right now.” He tells Rolling Stone that fans can expect more from their upcoming album: “With Infinite, fans can expect nothing less than the essence of Mobb Deep—the gritty New York sound they know and love, unapologetically true to what we have always delivered, even in a constantly shifting musical landscape.”
The Alchemist recently told Rolling Stone that he feels indebted to Mobb Deep for helping him get his start in music, and that he and Havoc culled through “so much music” to craft Infinite, which they did before even finding a label for it. “We all felt that at some point in time [we’d] figure out how to let it out to the world,” Alchemist said. “Keep that spirit alive since it’s missing.” He revealed that the Infinite recording process included several members of the Mobb orbit: “I called him, [and said] let’s get the crew back together. Hav, [Big Twins], [Ty Nitty], Chinky, all came to my studio, and we all did it like we used to…[we] started the album that way just to bring the spirit back. His daughter was there, she’s doing crazy stuff now. Shout to Santana Fox.”
He also spoke on how the project came together, noting, “I had songs with P on it. [Havoc] had some songs, we had some stuff that we mixed up. Some stuff we had to do beats, some stuff he was already on and Hav just rhymed. But it really felt good that we put the energy back together and did it the way we were supposed to. That’s how we always did it. Hav does the majority of the album. I do a couple, I think I did four in the end.”
Prodigy’s most recent posthumous project was The Hegelian Dialectic 2: The Book Of Heroine, a project that came with the return of his catalog to DSPs after an arduous process of clearing songs. Since 2017, Havoc has released a slew of collaboration projects, with the last being 2024’s Guttr with Ras Kass and RJ Payne.
