When Mobb Deep rhymed about getting away last year, did they really mean it?

Besides a few songs here and there on the mixtapes, the tough-talking Queensbridge duo of Havoc and Prodigy have been seemingly quiet, laying low. On the contrary, though, the Mobb's actually been very busy, following some of their well-known peers like P. Diddy, LL Cool J and Jermaine Dupri to the negotiating table to make a deal to end their free agency.

"We had a long struggling fight to get off Columbia," Havoc said Friday in New York. "We're just two months off of there. Everybody thinks we've been got off. We just got off. They was trying to hold us and keep us."

When Loud, the recording home where they became stars along with the Wu-Tang Clan and Big Pun, among others, was absorbed by Columbia Records and later folded in late 2001, Hav and P were signed straight up to Sony Music.

"It wasn't like we had a bad relationship with them, we just wanted to start off fresh," Prodigy recalled. "We been in this game for a minute so it's our time to start fresh and get a nice deal poppin'. It feels good [to be off of Loud]. Loud was just a stepping stone in the history of Mobb Deep, we just gotta keep it moving. I like the feeling of going out there and getting other people's point of view on us. Go polly with the presidents of all the labels out there. I wanna sit down and talk with the big sharks."

"We're negotiating with a couple of labels right now, some major labels," Havoc said. [We'll sign with] whoever got the best to offer, not only money, but the whole situation got to be lovely. We gonna take our time but not too long. 'Cause we still have to feed our fans, give them what they need."

To serve up their dishes of diabolical ditties, all the Mobb had to do was look in their files. Although they said not to expect a new LP to hit stores until summertime, they will be sending the streets a mixtape called Free Agents early next year.

"It's just to cover the street angle for our fans, let them know we still here with you while we're covering our negotiations," Havoc explained. "Nothing more, nothing less. It's a mixtape. The average Mobb fan, they'll like it. It's a snippet of what's to come in the future."

For Free Agents, the Mobb decided to drop a few new gems as well as go back and revamp some of their classics like "Shook Ones Part II" and "Survival of the Illest," using the same beats but incorporating new lyrics and choruses.

"We flipped a lot of our old beats, made them more gangsta," Prodigy said. "We wanted to do something different so we was like, 'Let's rhyme over all our old sh--.'

" 'Cause these days you have mixtapes and hear artists rhyming over other people's sh--," Havoc added. "But we was saying we got a lot of material to our credit, we could rhyme over our sh--. We always hear [those old records] because we perform them, but to hear new lyrics over and recreate, it felt like seeing an old friend."

As for the new Mobb album for record stores, they say they already have more than 200 songs in the can and are still mulling over cameo appearances.

"It's for the streets," Havoc said. "Most importantly, it will have that hungry sound. Not trying to be commercial, just trying to be us. It's not gonna be no pre-thought situation where we be like, 'This for radio, we gonna do this for the streets.' We just gonna be us."

"At the end of the day, we just want the fans to be like, 'The Mobb always came through, every time, every album,' " Prodigy added.