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Monster Mash-Up: Diplo, Black Lips, Lil B, and More of 2012’s Essential Halloween Mixtapes

halloween mixtapes lil b diplo black lips

The Internet is rife with Halloween mixtapes today, both from bands and DJs offering up their favorite seasonal selections and ambitious rappers flooding DatPiff with demented freestlyes about despicable things. (It should be noted that Odd Future, Insane Clown Posse, and Slayer have maintained a quiet confidence on this day of demonic days.) In an effort to free up your time so you can get that fake butcher knife wedged into your head just so, SPIN has rounded up the five mixes you need to hear, with an ear toward maximum creep and haunted house party appropriateness. Also: lots, and lots, of Three 6 Mafia.

1. Mad Decent beat maven and Major Lazer main man Diplo delivers DIPLO GOES IN ON HALLOWEEN, a three-hour mix from his BBCR1extra radio show, with help from producer System D-128 and a whole lot of Three 6 Mafia. Monstrous mashups over “Monster Mash.”

2. Atlanta flower punks and party boys Black Lips offer up their Hallowe’en Mixtape 2012, a set of shaggy rock obscurisms, vampirically vamping jazz instrumentals, spooky country, and, of course, more Three Six Mafia. Oh, and his dark lordship Aleister Crowley stops by.

3. Chillwave ambassador Memory Tapes creates his second All Hallow’s mix, a short but scary set dubbed Walk Me Home 2. Imagine a handful of ’80s horror scores (from New Age synth to old school orchestras) dubbed to tape, then shoved into a pumpkin and willfully warped.

4. Lil B the Based God has whipped up the ungodly Halloween H20. Actually, it’s pretty much only a Halloween mixtape in name — it includes a song “Merry Xmas” — but it’s weird enough to freak out your parents and neighbors. Trick or treat? You decide.

5. RL Grime hails from San Francisco’s rising Wedidit beat collective (Shlohmo, Jonwayne, Groundislava, D33J) and his Goosebumps Halloween Mixtape offers a brutalizing combination of space-bass music, purple ghost raps, and “an exclusive R.L. Stine drop.”