Puff Daddy & The Family - No Way Out (2LP) - White Vinyl

No Way Out lands like a time capsule and a victory lap in one. Released on 1 July 1997 through Bad Boy and Arista, it caught Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs right in the blast radius of tragedy and triumph. The Notorious B.I.G. had been killed only months earlier, Bad Boy was running radio, and Puff stepped from the boardroom to the booth with a blockbuster debut that topped the Billboard 200 and went on to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album the following year. That context matters, because you can hear the mourning and the champagne fizz trade places from track to track, sometimes within the same song.

The alchemy is in the sound. Bad Boy’s in-house team The Hitmen, including Stevie J, Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie, Nashiem Myrick, Ron Lawrence and Chucky Thompson, turned sampling into arena spectacle. “Victory” opens with charging horns lifted from Bill Conti’s Rocky theme, and it still feels massive, a proper curtain-raiser with Busta Rhymes roaring on the hook and Biggie laying down those cold, precision verses. When people talk about glossy late 90s New York rap, they mean this. Polished, yes, but heavy.

Then there is “I’ll Be Missing You,” a global memorial that borrowed The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” with Faith Evans and 112 carrying the emotion. It was inescapable that winter here and topped the Hot 100 in the US. The song’s ubiquity sometimes obscures how carefully it’s built, right down to the drums that leave space for Faith’s plea. If you remember Sting stepping out at the 1997 MTV VMAs to sing it live with them, you remember the chills. The album swings back from sorrow to flash with “Been Around the World,” Puff and Mase trading breezy verses, Biggie rolling in like a world-weary kingpin. The hook lodges in your head on first play and refuses to leave.

“Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” is the statement of intent, an early single that smashed its way to number one with a sly nod to Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride” and a backbone borrowed from “The Message.” It codified the Bad Boy playbook. Familiar but flipped, street but tailored. And then there’s “It’s All About the Benjamins,” which turned a line into a cultural shorthand. By the time Lil’ Kim storms in on the remix version that most of us know, the energy is pure spark. Even in album form, with The Lox snapping, it’s the sort of record that still sets off a dance floor in a Melbourne record store on a Friday-night in-store, if the fader hits it at the right moment.

What makes No Way Out more than a singles machine is the cast and the pacing. Jay-Z turns up on “Young G’s” with Biggie, the three of them plotting ambition as a strategy. You get little production flourishes everywhere, from choir swells to strings that never feel cheap. Puff’s writing is often about mood and arrangement, and here he plays to it. He is a ringmaster who knows when to step back and let the talent breathe. The sequencing pulls you through grief, grind and flex, with just enough quiet to let the big records hit harder when they arrive.

Critically, the album was met with praise for its scale and craft, and it has only grown more emblematic of its era. It stands as a marker of how pop and rap collided in the late 90s, not by watering anything down, but by making the drama bigger. If you stack it next to other Bad Boy releases of the period, it feels like the flagship. You can hear Stevie J and company fine-tuning a sound that would dominate radio and clubs for years.

On vinyl, that punch translates nicely. If you find No Way Out vinyl in clean condition, the low end on “Victory” and “Benjamins” is a proper room-shaker, and the sample detail pops. Puff Daddy vinyl tends to move quickly in shops, and for good reason. For anyone looking to buy Puff Daddy records online, or to round out a run of Puff Daddy albums on vinyl, this is the essential spine of the shelf. It is the record that explains why the logo on that shiny suit mattered. If you are crate-digging for vinyl records Australia wide, keep this one on your mental want list. It is history you can drop a needle on, and it still brings the room to life.