PRhyme

PRhyme is a collaborative hip-hop duo formed by rapper Royce da 5’ 9” and legendary producer DJ Premier, two artists whose friendship and creative partnership stretch back to the late 1990s, when they collaborated on underground staples like «Boom» and «Hip Hop». Their chemistry as MC and producer had already been proven over more than a decade of guest verses and one-off tracks before they decided to formalize the partnership into a full group.

The project’s defining creative conceit came from DJ Premier’s decision to build the entire debut album exclusively from samples of a single musician, composer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge. That constraint gave the self-titled debut, released in December 2014, a cohesive, cinematic, soul-and-funk-inflected sound that stood apart from typical boom-bap productions of the era, with Royce delivering dense, technically sharp verses over Premier’s chopped loops and cuts.

The duo followed up with «PRhyme 2» in 2018, again built around a single source of samples, this time from producer-multi-instrumentalist Antonio “Beat Butcha” Fresco alongside contributions shaping a similarly unified sonic palette. Across both records the group leaned heavily on guest appearances from artists across the hip-hop spectrum, cementing PRhyme as a showcase for classicist, sample-driven rap craftsmanship at a moment when the genre was moving in more electronic and trap-influenced directions.