Denzel Curry: TA13OO (original) (raw)

The first third has the most surprises. Curry describes the album as being split into three sections: the light, the gray, and the dark side, though there isn’t a whole lot of brightness to the opening segment. Finatik N Zac’s production on “Black Balloons” might bounce like the kind of mid-1990s rap hit that would have gotten plenty of MTV rotation, but Curry spends his verse pondering suicide (“Soon black balloons pop/That’ll be the day the pain stops.”) The song plays as a reminder that pain often bubbles beneath a veneer of extraversion—the tears of a clown are often the most acidic. It’s a theme he frequently returns to. Take “Clout Cobain,” from the gray section: a reminder that Kurt resonates with kids too young to have copped In Utero first time around.

Away from the tracks with heavier themes, the battering “Sumo” fully immerses in SoundCloud rap’s core tenets, with Curry’s shit-talking one-liners extremely on point: Saying you’ve got pockets like a sumo is the hilarious long way round to describing the size of your money clip. Curry also finds a synonym for “bricks” in Shaq’s free throws before name-dropping wrestler Rikishi. “Sumo” even makes a sample of Lil Jon’s yells of “WHAT!” sound fresh 14 years after Dave Chappelle made it uncool.

Some ears will never adjust to songs like “Sumo” or the noisy, head-banging number “Black Metal Terrorist.” The dissonance of these tracks owes a debt to rap metal, Aphex Twin, and Yeezus, in no particular order. On top of the chaos, Curry’s voice is clean and youthful, carrying the kind of power once deployed by a 16-year-old Chief Keef. It’s the menace of guys who are young, dumb, and with precisely zero scruples.

There are moments when Curry’s dedication to the album’s core strengths slides away. On “Sirens,” the switch between fiery rapping and clean pop hook doesn’t quite mesh with the beat, making it a rare moment when his vocal instincts fail. It’s an all-in socially engaged number featuring, among other things, some stray shots fired at serpent-in-chief Donald Trump, which, though undoubtedly unfeigned, feels a little perfunctory in a world where rap music is frequently providing the most trenchant critiques of Trump’s America.

It’s when he sticks to the highly personal that Curry’s music is devoid of all cliché—the power of his performance, the veracity of his pen, and the color of his wordplay make him an expert at voicing the tribulations of this doomed condition we call being young. All of this makes him impossible to place in the broader SoundCloud rap domain. Signs point to an artist who will outlast any single distribution platform—or any of the genres named for them.