Unlocked

Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats are both forward-thinking hip-hop artists who love a collaboration, so it was perhaps only a matter of time before the pair joined forces and made a record together. Unlocked, the EP that the Floridian rapper and Connecticut producer have created, is the set of hard-headed joints that fans of the artists would have been hoping for from the duo’s link-up.

Curry is typically commanding here. He is a magnetic presence throughout Unlocked, his flow a heightened bark that teeters on the verge of shouting while also sometimes spiralling off into new registers. There’s a bit of the wildcard flavour of early Nicki Minaj and golden-age Busta Rhymes about his raps on tracks like ‘Take It Back’.

Meanwhile the instrumentals that Kenny Beats serves up knock and wobble with the force of early Paul White. Productions such as ‘So Incredible’ are hefty yet spacious, the drums weighted perfectly for Curry to come through and bulldoze the track. There’s an erratic energy to Unlocked similar to that which we heard on one of Beats’ previous collaborations, the 2019 tape Anger Management that he made with Rico Nasty.

Rapper Denzel Curry and beatmaker Kenny Beats are a dream combination for fans of modern underground hip-hop. On their new collaborative collection Unlocked the pair make good on their promise with a set of trunk-rattling tunes.