Mickey Diamond x Ral Duke

Denmark first press 2024. Michelangelo edition, limited to 350. Pop-Up artwork included.
The first Mickey Diamond album of last year, Oroku Saki, was a colourful, succinct burst of top-tier rapping and retro throwbacks to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and movies, with plentiful nods to the late great MF DOOM (if the cover art wasn’t enough of a clue) tossed in for good measure. Its sequel of course shares much of this same DNA, with the runtime being the most noticeable change: Super Shredder is literally twice as long as its predecessor, and though 45 minutes isn’t exactly an eternity, that Mickey is able to apply his themes and references so consistently throughout is one of the record’s most unexpected strengths. As early as the first track, the menacing entendres are coming fast and furious (“Crash your dome, smash/Mad colours flashing when the chrome blast/Dimension X is where you soul’s casted”) over a classic boom bap pairing of thudding percussion and eerie piano loops. The lengthier runtime also gives producer Ral Duke more opportunity to experiment, something he takes full advantage of immediately thereafter with the Motown-esque samples on Shredder Loves April – a strange concept for any TMNT fan to wrap their head around, certainly, but Mickey’s twisted romanticism is an oddly effective sell. The soulful détente of Coffee Beans is even more hypnotic; the writing isn’t quite at its peak here, but as Mickey’s flow weaves in and out of the instrumental with barely a stop for breath, it’s impossible not to get sucked into the track’s aura: “Prime minister, with a passion to rhyme sinister/Pure underground, crime sprees like John Dillinger/Known to take over small towns and rob villagers/Break factions down to fractions and small integers”.