After a busy month of World Domination 4 prep and recapping, we return with another installment of the five battles you shouldn’t miss from August.

MOS PROB VS SOUL

Both of these Don’t Flop MCs dig deep into battle rap culture and the pop/literary canon, referencing: Andy Murray, Loaded Lux, manna from heaven, the Shroud of Turin, Tolstoy, Game of Thrones’ house sigils, Tay Roc and Mike Tyson (and that’s just for starters) - all while being funny, cutting and direct. Hell, Prob even tears Soul up for making obscure references. And his “Loch Ness Lee” line just became frontrunner for Rebuttal of the Year. Watch this battle. You might just learn something.

J-PRO VS JC

This battle stands alone as one of the month’s best, but it also strikes us as a unique opportunity for KOTD West Coast. The battle is introduced by Niko from Corridor Digital, Jimmy Wong from Video Game High School and Harley from Epic Meal Time. They have 454,000 Twitter followers between the three of them (or about 10x KOTD’s), and put out some of the most popular, well-produced and viral content to a combined 13.9 million YouTube subscribers (or about 100x KOTD’s).

We’d love to see a collaboration between KOTD and any of these guys, but think some sort of Street Fighter-inspired Corridor Digital production could be the push battle rap needs to pass its tipping point. Lush One’s recent cameo in a Timothy DeLaGhetto video has gotten more views than Dizaster/T-Rex in the same amount of time, proving this is clearly a huge audience to tap into.

CHARRON VS SOWETO KINCH

If you didn’t know Charron before World Domination 4, you likely do now. The 21-year-old Ottawa freestyle phenomenon has been on such an exponential rise in his last few performances that we’d swear he got his Ritalin mixed up with Hollohan’s steroids. Watch him in this grab-bag freestyle clash the day after dismantling Unanymous in Don’t Flop. While Soweto Kinch keeps things fairly even for the first few minutes, Charron eventually outlasts him and it’s over just when it feels like the kid is getting warmed up. Make sure you’re paying attention at 3:20, when Charron leaves his second Don’t Flop rapper of the weekend left hanging.

ILL WILL VS LOTTA ZAY

This battle, from BET’s Ultimate Freestyle Friday competition, gets everything right that a lot of the NOME3 videos get wrong. It’s short, it’s not interrupted by an unruly crowd or sound effects every 30 seconds, and it features two hungry up-and-comers on a platform that really shows off their writing and performance.

DANJA ZONE VS NUBORN

Black Ice Cartel has been quietly releasing quality content out of Milwaukee since late 2012. They got some recognition with battles featuring Heartless and Big Kannon, but this Danja Zone/Nuborn matchup is their first bona fide hit, and it currently accounts for 20,000 of their channel’s 100,000 views. Their October card in Illinois has a ton of potential, as long as four of the MCs in their main events aren’t tapped out from Battle of the Bay 6, which goes down the week before.

BONUS: BULLE VS SPOOK ONE

Never mind that Bulle just hit our Top 5 Underrated list with this performance, WATCH HOW DRUNK THE GUY IN THE BACKGROUND IS. Seriously, he falls over around 5:20. And this was the first battle of the night.

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And check out our other content:

-Battles of the month: July
-Everything you missed at KOTD’s World Domination 4 (Day 1)
-Top quotes from the WD4 press conference
-Five battles that need to happen