East Oakland's Souls of Mischief belong to the informal underground hip-hop alliance Hieroglyphics. The quartet—A-Plus, Phesto, Opio, and Tajai—delivers cerebral yet uncompromising rhymes that fuse disorder, menace, and experimental impulses through an intellectual B-Boy lens. Their first full-length release, the 1993 album 93 'Til Infinity, yielded the early-'90s anthem of the identical title and helped ignite a wave of bohemian yet street-hardened hip-hop. Observers likened the crew's abstract, playful narrative approach to that of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest.
On their 1995 follow-up, No Man's Land, Souls of Mischief deliberately abandoned the sound that had defined them, prompting some listeners anticipating another "'95 Til" to drift away while others remained loyal to the evident artistic growth. Eschewing the formula that had endeared them to college audiences, the group dismantled its prior image much as De La Soul had with the album De La Soul Is Dead. The collective next operated independently on 1999's Focus before swiftly issuing the dark, psychedelic, and introspective Trilogy: Conflict, Climax, Resolution the year after. Nine years elapsed before the fifth album, Montezuma's Revenge, arrived with its twelve tracks helmed by Prince Paul. The members then partnered with multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Adrian Younge for the conceptual There Is Only Now, which appeared on Younge's Linear Labs imprint in 2014 and featured additional contributions from Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Busta Rhymes, and Snoop Dogg.
