Unlocked is the product of a twenty-four hour recording session at Kenny Beats' studio following MC Denzel Curry’s appearance on the producer’s podcast The Cave. The album comes after a short fabricated beef between the two over social media and was announced with a short animated film that features the duo traveling throughout the internet to retrieve their leaked album. If you didn’t know the history of this album, you’d never know that it was made in a condescend window of time. These tracks are sample-heavy, pulling from various bits of found footage and commercial radio, run through a processor with a highly disorienting effect. The beats, when not comprised of human voices, usually lean towards the heavy and minimalistic, with only the faintest nods to R’nB and funk sprinkled through-out. Denzel Curry has a take-no-prisoner’s flow that verges on shouting and it’s extremely impressive to hear him maintain such a strong sense of rhythm while he spits truth from his vantage point, informed by an aggressive reading of contemporary life. Some parts feel a little undercooked, but all things considered, Unlocked hits a lot of the same dopamine centers in my brain as Run the Jewels, and that is something that I cannot bring myself to raise a fuss about.
Grab a physical spinner of Unlocked here, and check out the short film Denzel Curry, Kenny Beats - UNLOCKED below:
