Pete Rock - Soul Survivor [2LP]

Soul Survivor finds Pete Rock stepping out from behind the boards under his own name, and this 2LP set spreads his 1998 solo debut across four sides of 140-gram vinyl.

By the late nineties the Mount Vernon producer had already helped define hip-hop's golden era, both alongside C.L. Smooth and through a run of remixes that other beatmakers studied closely. Rather than carry the mic himself, he turned his first solo album into an open house, producing nearly every track and handing verses to a guest list stacked with East Coast heavyweights, plus a few visitors from the West Coast.

The beats are the glue: warm horn stabs, chopped soul loops and drums that knock without ever feeling stiff. Tru Master, one of the album's singles, puts Inspectah Deck and Kurupt on the same beat, Verbal Murder 2 stacks Big Pun, Noreaga and Common for a proper posse cut, and Take Your Time followed as a single the next year. Da Two reunites him with C.L. Smooth, giving longtime fans the chemistry they had been missing.

More than two decades on, Soul Survivor remains a crate-digger's favourite and a masterclass in how a producer can be the star of the show without saying much at all.