Denzel Curry/Kenny Beats: Unlocked [LOMA VISTA]

Why you'll love it

This vinyl EP puts the whole quick-fire project on one record, glitchy file-name track titles and all. Unlocked scored 81 on Metacritic, and Spin named it one of the 30 best albums of the first half of 2020.

This edition

• 12" EP

About the album

Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats didn't get on at first. Their early sessions went nowhere, and a beat Curry wanted ended up with someone else, which cooled things for months. Then Curry heard Freddie Gibbs freestyle on Kenny's The Cave series, turned up on it himself in August 2019, and the pair started recording straight away, finishing in a matter of days. Curry's manager, Mark Maturah, had been pushing the pairing since the Ta13oo tour, and the patience paid off.

The result is lean and hungry, swinging between snarling, futuristic bars and mid-90s boom bap. "Take_It_Back_v2" and "Lay_Up.m4a" hit hard, "DIET_" runs on pure adrenaline, and "'Cosmic'.m4a" closes on a smoky, jazzy groove. Kenny's sample-heavy production nods to Madlib, Stones Throw and the Wu-Tang Clan, and the strange track titles stayed because the duo liked how odd they looked in iTunes.

It arrived with a 24-minute short film mixing live action, animation and claymation, with a look borrowed in places from Gorillaz and Cowboy Bebop. Two artists, one studio and a few days; we've had meetings about the staff rota that took longer.

Also at Kops: more Denzel Curry on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Loma Vista (cat# LVR00844), the 2020 EP.