There is a version of underground hip-hop that has become so fluent in its own language. These are tough tales of street corners, the weight of cocaine and consequence, the documentation of hard lives lived under difficult circumstances. These are not invalid subjects. On the contrary, some of hip-hop’s greatest records have told these tales and shown work of great moral weight.
Yet when you maybe don’t have a heavyweight lyricist to tell these stories and inspire, then the music can fail to deliver the punch, and just end up sounding familiar. “Peter and the Wolf”, released on Sukseed Records and Deep Fried Beats, is a welcome departure from the norm. Full disclosure: I am the executive producer of this record and co-conceived the project with producer Sam Seed. What I offer is an honest account of why we made this single, and what it means.
“Peter and the Wolf” is a fantasy retelling of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s beloved 1936 children’s tale, but recast as hip-hop — not as parody, not as novelty, but as a genuine act of imaginative departure. The story, the rhymes, and Seed’s whimsical production are designed, quite deliberately, to transport you away. This music does not reflect the world. It builds a new one.
The casting is where the concept earns its credibility. billy woods — one half of Armand Hammer and the author of Golliwog (2025), which featured in Rolling Stone’s top 20 albums of the year — takes the role of Peter: the restlessly poetic, perpetually searching figure who ventures into danger not from recklessness but from an inability to remain still.
It is, for anyone familiar with billy woods’ records, an almost unnervingly apt fit. His verse is a dark description of Peter in the woods, and it succeeds from the start in creating tension. Peter has always lived in a tension between action and narration, between the event and his attempt to find meaning in it. Peter is a character who does not fully understand what he is walking into – and that’s what billy woods has been writing about across his entire career.
Mickey Diamond plays the Wolf. Diamond’s releases generate the kind of anticipation more commonly associated with limited streetwear drops; physical copies sell out on launch day, and a cult following that moves the moment something becomes available. As the Wolf, he brings precisely what the role demands: gritty, charismatic gravitas. Diamond does not need to perform menace. It is simply present.
The counterpoint between his energy and billy woods’ is one of the single’s defining pleasures: two elite lyricists operating in the same fictional space, each illuminating the other. Peter is warned not to play in the forest. An inner-city child is warned not to wander into the wrong neighbourhood. The warning is the same.
The parallels between the artists and their roles run deeper than casting. Within hip-hop, woods and Diamond could reasonably be seen as representatives of opposing worlds — much as Peter and the Wolf are natural adversaries. woods carries the intelligence and poetic stance of a critical media favourite; Diamond represents a rawer, less documented corner of the culture – street documentation, brash humour, an aggressive and visceral approach.
In this telling, billy woods as Peter embodies humanity and intelligence prevailing; Mickey Diamond as the Wolf embodies the hunger and danger of the wild and the threat of street life. Both characters are driven by an unfiltered need to satisfy their desires above all else.
Sam Seed’s production deserves its own examination. Over the past year, Sam Seed has produced for underground elite rappers including Conway the Machine, Ghostface Killah, Kool Keith, Ill Bill, Vinnie Paz, Kurious, and Blade, among others — a body of collaborative work that spans the full breadth of underground rap’s geography. Those credits required him to inhabit worlds already built.
“Peter and the Wolf” asks something different of him: to construct a sonic environment that could plausibly contain both a children’s folk tale and two of hip-hop’s most serious lyricists without condescending to either. His response is dark, hypnotic, and whimsical. His production is cinematic without grandiosity, strange without alienation.
The foundations of Prokofiev’s tale are kept but expanded upon. The traditional orchestra is replaced by vinyl samples and booming 808 drums. The original narration — that guiding voice steering the listener through the story — is replaced by the rappers themselves in verse, while the original narration is scratched back in by DJ Bnutz of Canada as a supporting, grounding element beneath the reimagination.
The decision to present “Peter and the Wolf” on limited 7” multicoloured vinyl — two distinct designs, two colourways, a collector’s piece by deliberate intent — is not merely a commercial strategy. The 7” single carries its own cultural history, one that maps directly onto the lineage of this project. It is the format of the break, of the rare groove, of the digger’s practice that connects Deep Fried Beats, my vinyl-only DJ collective, to the tradition it operates within. To press a hip-hop fairytale onto a format that demands to be held in your hands is to make an argument about what this music is for: not background content, not streamed and forgotten, but something closer to what Prokofiev intended: a work designed to make you listen.
Underground hip-hop is not short of technical excellence, nor of artists willing to document the textures of difficult lives with honesty and craft. What is rarer — and what “Peter and the Wolf” offers — is the willingness to ask what the genre sounds like when it leaves that terrain entirely. When it grants itself permission to be fantastical, experimental enough to matter, and rooted in art rather than autobiography.
billy woods and Mickey Diamond are two of hip-hop’s most elite lyricists. On this record, they are also Peter and the Wolf. That the distinction feels entirely natural is the measure of how well the concept has been realised. I hope it inspires more fantastical hip-hop that lets listeners escape their realities. I know Sam Seed, and I will continue to do just that, exploring more fantasies to be retold.