In the 1985 William Friedkin film To Live and Die in L.A., Willem Dafoe portrays a murderous counterfeiter who paints in his spare time—only to burn the canvases. As his Instagram teasers and leaked YouTube snippets suggest, Chief Keef's official releases are just the tip of a massive recorded archive. But Keef is interested in what he's doing today, not what he's done; new projects make his old work irrelevant. Many of his songs, long-forgotten evidence of a particular tributary of his evolution, lay dormant, unreleased, or lost—like the original version of Bang 2, which promised songs such as the DP Beats-produced "Stop Calling". Although credited to Lil Keis when it leaked—DP was locked up at the time—the song was the first in a series of collaborations between DP Beats and Chief Keef. At the time, its addictive giddiness suggested a surefire smash; now it languishes in poor quality on YouTube—burned, essentially—and Keef has long since moved on.

Almighty DP is a DJ-free CD-quality compilation put together by DP Beats himself, the first in a series of tapes culling the duo's work together, songs released primarily over the course of the past year. It's essential not just because the music is uniformly great—by any standard, this is one of the most consistent tapes in Keef's catalog—but because it captures a period of time in which each individual piece is in danger of being lost, released only as a low-quality YouTube snippet, or perhaps never seeing the light of day at all.

Where Young Chop built upon more maximal tendencies, DP Beats is detail-oriented, conveying more subtle shifts of mood. Though the producer is based in North Carolina, his sound has shaped the popular music of the Midwest: the enigmatic melancholy of "Tec" and its sour brother "Fool Ya" were both major regional records last summer, with "Fool Ya" receiving regular spins on Power 92 and cresting 8 million views on YouTube. Though neither made an official Chief Keef project, both are included here in pristine quality, capturing drill music's recent drift into the disorienting. DP's more recent work is represented in cuts like "Don't Love Her" (originally intended for Keef's unreleased Thot Breaker project), which piles on layers of keyboard melodies to suggest a sugary rush. It's the kind of giddy thing which would normally accompany a song about a new crush, giving Keef's icy denials an ironic frame.

Many of the best records here work similarly, as miniature synthesizer symphonies that aim for synapse-overload. Though DP's work shares the same roots as the 808 Mafia formula that dominates the Southern club circuit, he's got more ideas, a more subtle sense for vibe, and ornate tastes. DP likes active snares and tricky drum programming, and Keef—in splitting the difference between rapper, auteur, and songwriter—knows how to best complement these widely varying canvases. On "Runnin"—one of the tape's more recent records—he fits his voice right at the center of the cascading keyboards with a hooky central melody, letting the beat swirl around him. When the melody jumps up and down like a jagged EKG, as on "Worries," he raps with a deadened affect.

The records which best illustrate the duo's chemistry, though, aren't always the most complex: "Know She Does" relies on a simple four-note melody, and its directness is euphoric. But perhaps the tape's best record—the bonus track "Rolls", hidden on the second half of "All In"—is the best example of DP's ability to effortlessly juggle intricate, interlocking melodic pieces without losing sight of the bigger picture. The swarming whirlwind of sound acts as a sweet release while Keef croons in craggy autotune. But the song's success is all in the details, the way DP plays with the EQ settings, giving shape to the track that makes it less loop than song. Anyone interested in current street rap's potential for emotional breadth shouldn't miss it.