Credit: Chad Cooper

The difficult second album is a real phenomenon. Those artists who find great commercial and critical success with their debut release face a huge amount of pressure to live up to expectations for album number two. Some of them rise to it. Others struggle. The stress of trying to surpass your own previous work can be a difficult thing to deal with, and it was a problem that faced A$AP Rocky following the success of his 2013 debut LONG.LIVE.A$AP. But, for his follow-up in 2015, AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, Rocky had a secret weapon at his disposal: the genius of Danger Mouse.

For a producer who has helped to create so many incredible works, Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, flies somewhat under the radar.

That’s not to say his talents haven’t been recognised at all—the man has won six Grammys and has been nominated 22 times—but, even so, considering the breadth of his discography, there’s a case to be made that he is literally the greatest producer of the 21st century. He is rarely spoken about in such terms.

So many great albums bear his influence. He arrived on the scene with 2004’s The Grey Album, which mixed Jay-Z’s vocals from The Black Album with the music from the Beatles’ White Album, which was an overtly political act from Danger Mouse’s own perspective. “I always felt it was so silly,” he told The Guardian in 2015, “hip-hop kids in one corner, rock kids in the other. I wanted people in both corners to see the other side.”

This ethos was explicitly in play as he helped to produce Gorillaz’ second album, Demon Days, which came out in 2005 and combined all sorts of styles, from rock to pop to hip hop to even acid house. That same year of 2005 also saw the release of Danger Mouse’s collaboration with MF DOOM, The Mouse & The Mask, and the following year he was finding mega-success as one half of Gnarls Barkley, alongside Cee-lo Green. Danger Mouse would later produce work for Beck, The Black Keys, U2, Adele, Red Hot Chili Peppers and many, many others. Hardly a year goes by without at least one Danger Mouse-produced hit.

Someone who had watched Danger Mouse’s remarkable career play out was a young A$AP Rocky. “I was one of the biggest Gnarls Barkley fans that I know,” Rocky told Refinery29 way back in 2013. “When I used to sell weed, I used to bag up to ‘Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,’ ‘No Time Soon,’ ‘Who Cares?’ ‘Charity Case,’ all that shit. I used to just play [Gnarls Barkley’s second album] The Odd Couple all day. Just bump it. And I fell in love with Danger Mouse’s production, to the point where I’ve always said in interviews that I’d love to work with him, love to work with him, love to work with him.”

Rocky got that opportunity during the making of his debut album, when Danger Mouse came on board to produce the track ‘Phoenix,’ but that wasn’t enough.

For AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, Rocky brought him back for more, with Danger Mouse serving as one of the record’s executive producers and several of the tracks being produced by him personally. The resulting album was a hit, charting at number one and eventually being certified double platinum. Danger Mouse didn’t produce every song, but, without his genre-spanning contributions throughout, there’s no way it would have sounded as it did.