Two standalone posts already went up on widontplay this week — Larry June and DJ.Fresh's "Organic Motion" on July 7, and O.G.C.'s "Make Peace" on July 9. Both are worth reading separately. The weekly radar covers four releases that have not been written up yet: Mickey Diamond and Big Ghost Ltd's Blood of the Lamb, the final chapter in one of the more consistent trilogies underground hip-hop has produced recently; Xzibit, B-Real and Demrick's "Call the Cops" official video dropping today; El Da Sensei's "Hold On" from The Unusual 20th Anniversary; and The Doppelgangaz with "Must Be Dreamin'" off Beats for Brothels Vol. 9.
Mickey Diamond & Big Ghost Ltd – Blood of the Lamb
No announcement. No single rollout. On June 12, Mickey Diamond and Big Ghost Ltd dropped Blood of the Lamb as a surprise, the third and final album in The Wolf, The Lamb & The Goat trilogy alongside Wolf Tickets and Black Sheep. All three arrived within roughly six months. All three were produced entirely by Big Ghost Ltd. All three came without pre-release campaigns.
The trilogy as a whole is one of the more underrated creative runs in the contemporary underground. Big Ghost Ltd — the Tokyo-based producer behind Ghostface Killah's Twelve Reasons to Die, 38 Spesh and Conway's The Ghronic: Speshal Machinery, and work with Rome Streetz and Crimeapple — brings a specific kind of production to Mickey Diamond's voice: soul loops with church weight, drums that hit harder than the mix suggests, and a palette that shifts between noir darkness and gospel warmth without losing coherence. Blood of the Lamb leans fully into the gospel end of that spectrum, and it is the trilogy's most ambitious record because of it.
The album opens with "Stigmata," where Mickey contrasts the pull of wealth against hollow fame over a soulful Boom Bap beat, and the frame holds for the full 12-track runtime. "Communion" is the album's argumentative center — Mickey states moral commandments and immediately interrogates them: "Thou shall not take another man's life. What if he had it coming? Can I ask for forgiveness? Promise, but I don't mean it — does that pass for repentance?" That question, posed without resolution, is exactly what makes the record work. He is not preaching. He is thinking aloud on tape. "Lamb's Blood" redirects the religious argument from God toward the people profiting in His name. "Holy Water" contains the album's most affecting moment: what begins as prayer ends on Mickey recounting his infant son finding a gun under the sofa and firing it, the shot grazing Mickey's own head before bouncing off the wall. His kid should have died. He is thanking God for the miss and calculating the weight of the moment in the same verse.
The sole feature is Daniel Son on "PREYers" — a natural pairing given Daniel Son's long collaborative history with Big Ghost's extended network. "Erick's Sermon" closes the album as a direct tribute to Mickey's father, built around an actual recorded phone conversation between them, his father half-asleep on the other end. Mickey names him at the close — Erick Robinson — so there is no ambiguity about who this means to him.
12 tracks, 44 minutes. Available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms through Big Ghost Ltd Music.
Xzibit, B-Real & Demrick – Call the Cops
The official video for "Call the Cops" dropped today, off the Serial Killers project's album This Thing of Ours on Ineffable Records. The single has been out since April 10 — produced by Scoop DeVille, son of Latino hip-hop pioneer Kid Frost, and built around a sample of LL Cool J's 1991 classic "Mama Said Knock You Out." Three West Coast veterans with real catalog weight on one track, and the formula holds. Xzibit and B-Real have been circling each other's orbit for years, and adding Demrick into the mix keeps the energy up across all three verses. Old school in the best sense — no reinvention, no reach, just people who know what they are doing letting the beat do its job.
El Da Sensei – Hold On
El Da Sensei is one-half of Artifacts, the Newark duo that helped define the sound of East Coast underground hip-hop in the mid-1990s alongside acts like Smif-N-Wessun and O.C. "Hold On" is the second video from The Unusual 20th Anniversary release — the original album came out in 2006 and is now back on Forest Green double vinyl through Fat Beats. The track is produced by Illmind and directed by Reemofilmedit. The production gives El room to maneuver rather than boxing him in, and he fills the space exactly as expected: confident delivery, sharp bars, no interest in shortcuts. The title says everything about the record's intent — hold on to what the music was actually built on. Available on vinyl at Fat Beats.
The Doppelgangaz – Must Be Dreamin'
"Must Be Dreamin'" is the latest video from Beats for Brothels Vol. 9, released June 26 on Bandcamp. Matter Ov Fact and EP wrote it, produced it, recorded it, mixed it, mastered it, and shot everything at The Brothel 845 in the Hudson Valley — their own studio, their own label, Groggy Pack Entertainment. 18 tracks on the project, all self-contained, zero outside input. The Doppelgangaz have been operating this way for years and the consistency of the output is the argument. "Must Be Dreamin'" keeps the same moody, slightly off-kilter pocket their best material runs on — slow-burn production, deadpan delivery, a world that belongs entirely to them. Exactly what you want from them.
