“Kill All Rats,” the Conway the Machine posse cut with Ransom and Rome Streetz, is older than it may sound to anyone hearing it for the first time now. The track was released in February 2021 on If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed, the second full project Conway built entirely with the anonymous producer Big Ghost Ltd, and its release record lists it under Big Ghost Ltd. Music.
That makes it more than five years old, and a useful doorway into one of the most productive rapper-producer pairings of the decade’s underground.
Who is on the track
Conway, born Demond Price in Buffalo, New York, co-founded Griselda Records with his half-brother Westside Gunn and Mach-Hommy, and he is known for dark, gritty, 1990s-rooted rhymes. Ransom and Rome Streetz, both New York rappers, would each go on to make a full album with the same producer. The release metadata clocks the song at a slow 76 beats per minute, the kind of drag-tempo boom-bap that suits three rappers trading heavy verses.
The beat comes from Big Ghost Ltd, and nobody outside the operation knows for sure whether that is one producer or several. The name has a strange history. In 2011 Wiz Khalifa went on the radio to call Ghostface Killah corny over blog comments about his single “Roll Up,” and Ghostface had to tweet that the blog was fake and not him. The blogger was Big Ghost, a parody so close to the Wu-Tang rapper’s voice that plenty of readers had been fooled. Four years later the parodist was making beats.
A trilogy, counted out
Here is how the Conway and Big Ghost Ltd partnership stacks up, release by release:
- September 11, 2015: Griselda Ghost, with Westside Gunn, the first release ever under the Big Ghost Ltd name.
- May 15, 2020: No One Mourns the Wicked, the first Conway and Big Ghost full-length.
- February 2021: If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed, home of “Kill All Rats.”
- June 17, 2022: What Has Been Blessed Cannot Be Cursed, closing out the trilogy.
Three Conway records in a little over two years, all from one beatmaker, is a pace few rappers sustain alongside their main catalog. The overlap with the guests kept going, too. Big Ghost produced a full Ransom album, Heavy Is the Head, in July 2021 and Rome Streetz’s Wasn’t Built In a Day in February 2023, with Conway appearing on that album’s “Suicide.” Conway later teamed with Ransom and V Don for Chaos Is My Ladder 2 in 2024.
Where Conway is now
Conway left Shady Records and Griselda in February 2022 and has since run his own label, Drumwork. His studio run since then includes Won’t He Do It (2023), Slant Face Killah (2024) and You Can’t Kill God with Bullets, released through Drumwork on December 12, 2025. He also worked with producer Conductor Williams on 2023’s CONDUCTOR MACHINE; Conductor Williams has just produced Bruiser Wolf’s Detroit album The Dealer Wins.
The New York lineage behind all of this is easy to trace. Conway met Mobb Deep’s Prodigy during the 2016 “Hell On Earth” tour, a nod to the album covered in Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth at 30, and Big Ghost’s whole persona was built on Ghostface, a member of the group behind Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers.
Conway’s most recent listed project is I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES, a 2026 tape with DJ Whoo Kid.
Further reading
Image: Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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