The rise of Benny the Butcher and Griselda Records has been undeniable in the last few years. “I laugh at this whole shit, how I captured it so quick,” Benny gloats on the opening track of The Plugs I Met 2.
Out today, the album was produced entirely by Brooklyn producer Harry Fraud. Fraud’s recent collaboration with Jim Jones seems to have bled over, with Jones appearing on The Plugs I Met 2, along with 2 Chainz, French Montana, Fat Joe, and Benny’s fellow Black Soprano Family artist and producer, Rick Hyde. The album also features the late Queens rapper and frequent Harry Fraud collaborator, Chinx.
Videos by VICE
Benny the Butcher’s raps are a perfect fit for Harry Fraud production. While
Burden of Proof, executive produced by Hit-Boy, was a polished introduction to the mainstream and the highest-charting project from Griselda Records, The Plugs I Met 2 is gritty nostalgia that picks up where the last Plugs left off. Both Plugs albums feature a cover with a weathered photo from Scarface, with white bars placed over the eyes, as to mimic surveillance photos. Somehow this imagery describes the music perfectly. As Harry Fraud told VICE, he sought out to create cinematic sounds with hard drums, with space for the Buffalo lyricist to move around.
While the first installment of Plugs was a clear homage to contacts from his past life, the latest project establishes Benny as the go-to guy himself. BSF, an acronym that once only referred to Benny’s Black Soprano Family collective, is now a sports agency, Big Sports Firm, where he’s “signing offensive linemen and BMX riders,” as he announced on “Thanksgiving.” On the same track, he also touches on a dark spot in 2020, when he was shot in the leg after getting robbed for his chain in Houston. He hit physical therapy to learn how to walk again, and replaced his stolen jewelry.
The Griselda rapper often preempts criticism of his subject matter and its focus on illicit pharmacology. But on “Thanksgiving,” he addresses this plainly: “lf you don’t like my shit, turn my shit off.” He fielded similar complaints in 2018, on “Broken Bottles,” off Tana Talk 3. His response was to double down: “I’ma write a whole album about the plugs I met.”
VICE spoke to the rapper and producer behind The Plugs I Met 2.
VICE: How did this project come together?
Harry Fraud: It came together pretty organically. I’ve been fucking with Benny for a few years now. I got hip to his music and then reached out, we had some mutual people between us, so it was really easy. We just linked up, started working on some songs, just to work on some songs. That was two or three years ago, and then it just slowly started to build momentum. And we were like, “Fuck it. These are easy. Let’s go.”
What made you decide to make this The Plugs I Met 2, as opposed to just another new project?
Benny the Butcher: Because it felt like that. The things that I was talking about, the mode that I was in, plus the way I recorded it. Like how I did The Plugs I Met with DJ Shay. I did it the same way with Harry. I did The Plugs I Met independent. That’s just my series, what I’m bringing. Then I got Harry locked in at the boards, so, hell yeah.
Harry: When I was first around Benny, He was working on [The Plugs I Met] out in Cali at Alchemist’s house. It was cool that this turned out to be part two, because I really got to soak up the vibe of part one when he was working on it.
So much has changed since the first Plugs came out. How did that change the process of putting this album together?
Benny: I got a higher profile, I got bigger and better things going on for myself. So it’s all about using that to be on my shit. A lot definitely has changed for me since the first Plugs. That’s another reason why I called this Plugs because this is prestigious, I hold this to a high regard. This project is definitely in that same lane. It’s going to be interesting when it touches down.
You two have a lot of the same people in your orbits. The Fraud Department [with Jim Jones] just came out, and Jim Jones on this record. How the guys that you have both worked with separately influence the features on The Plugs I Met 2?
Benny: The family. It’s all a family, I was working with the people he worked with, he brought Jim in, I got a relationship with French and Jim, this is upper echelon shit. Griselda is underground shit, and will always be underground, but I’m popping my head up and fucking with the legends. How I had [Black] Thought, and Kiss, and motherfucking Push on the other one, I got other shit like that going on on this one.
How did the lockdown affect how you experienced the music while you’re working on it, and getting to hear it, whether it’s at a club or just driving around?
Benny: My music’s not for the club anyway. A lot of people will listen to our music at home, inside of a car, at the gym and shit like that. And they’ve been more at home. They’ve been more in the cars, and they’ve been at gyms. So people been indulging in the music since COVID.
Do you remember when you two first collaborated on something?
Harry: The first song we worked on was “Talking Back,” and that ended up with Fat Joe on the album. And that was probably, I want to say 2017, 2018 maybe 2018. But that was the first one we worked on. I remember just getting in the studio with Benny, I had a bunch of different types of beats put to the side that were more slow, what I had heard from him. He was like, Give me one of them. I need one of them ones. One of them New York, your type of bounce that only you could do, and that’s what we knocked out. It was always the feeling like, we got that out the way, and then we could get to all the grimy shit.
You’ve talked in the past how you prefer to make beats specifically for the artist, as opposed to just sending a beat pack. When did you know what vibe you were going for here?
Harry: After that first one, it was kind of sporadic, but once I caught the vibe with Benny as a person—honestly was when I was like, Okay, let me make some stuff with this guy in mind. That really how I work, I gotta catch the vibe with the person and that lets me go down the road. By the third joint, I think was “Live By It,” it was pretty early. Once he laid that, I was like, “Oh, yeah, I know where to go.”
You mentioned this Fat Joe song is a few years old, how do you make sure the project sounds like it was all built at once?
Harry: Although we built it over the course of time, every time we would get in the studio, we would pick right up and it did feel like it was built all at once. We weren’t opposed to post-producing records and making sure we kept updating stuff as we built. We might have four records, and go back to the first one to make sure it sits even. The skeleton was there, but we sauced everything, after the fact to make sure it glued and we updated as we went and made sure everything sat with the batch as a group.
For both of you, what was the significance of getting Chinx on this record? How did you go about building the beat for a posthumous verse?Benny: It was Chinx. It was always an honor for me. It’s just dope, the way it came out, that sounds like some shit that me and Chinx would’ve did if he was here. And it’s an honor.
Harry: Chinx, that’s my brother. Every verse that he ever laid for me, I know by heart, in my mind. I had that mental cache to pull from. And when Benny laid that, and it was just the feeling and then that verse came in my mind. It’s difficult to take a verse and put it on something and build something around it, and not feel like I’m forcing this peg into the round hole, so to speak. That one, it was in-key, in-tempo, it locked right in. It was easy, as if it was just meant to be on that record. I’ve never had that process go quite that effortlessly.
You said the album was easy to lock in and knock out. Is there a plan to keep this as a franchise moving forward?
Benny: Hell yeah! I’m doing “Plugs I Met 30!” [laughs]
Harry: Honestly, he knows I’m locked in. That’s not even a question. I’m locked in whenever, wherever, we’re good, all the time.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
“The Plugs I Met 2” is streaming now.
Follow Ashwin Rodrigues on Twitter.
