BeatRoute Magazine AB Edition - March 2020

UNLOCKED
is out now
via PH
Recordings
“No matter who I played the album for,
Rick Rubin, Madlib, Ski Mask the Slump
God—that line made EVERYBODY laugh.
I’m playing this for people in their mid-50s
and people in their early 20s, and everyone
is having the same reaction. That’s how you
can tell Curry is really striking a chord.”
Their frenetic recording speed was helped
by the fact that both Curry and Beats are
magnetic, energetic extroverts, permanently
dialed up to 11. “Denzel’s personality is like
he’s in the middle of the Superbowl at all
times. He’s so hype, he’s got so much passion
and energy, and he’ll put anything on the
line to get his point across,” Beats explains
excitedly when talking about the younger
rapper. Curry says the exact same about his
counterpart: “Kenny’s just as animated as I
am. We’ll goof off in the studio, but when we
get to work, we get to work and we get shit
done. That’s how it was, and why we were
able to do this whole project in three days.”
The track titles on UNLOCKED are a sly
nod to the mid-’00s piracy era of the music
industry. Before streaming and Soundcloud
swallowed the music industry whole, The
Pirate Bay and its sketchier predecessor
LimeWire were must-haves for any industrious
young person looking to reload their
iPods with brand-new MP3s. More often
than not, the downloads would come with
unpolished name like “Take_it_Back_v2,”
“Pyro (leak 2019),” and “So.Incredible.pkg”
– to name just a few of the many memorable
track titles on UNLOCKED.
According to Curry, this naming scheme
was a premature middle finger to critics.
“We made this project in three days, and we
knew critics were going to say ‘oh, it doesn’t
sound finished, blah, blah, blah.’ We
wanted to say ‘shut the fuck up’
before they even had the chance to
say it, so we made our track names
look like our session file names or
some shit you’d get when you pirate
music.” They got their point across:
on repeated listens, UNLOCKED’s
deliberate rawness feels like a
feature, not a drawback.
Despite the multi-faceted rollout,
which included the pair getting into a fake
spat, leaking their project, and then releasing
a short movie slash music video where
the two transmogrify themselves inside a
series of animated cartoons, UNLOCKED
avoids gimmick entirely. Made at breakneck
pace and stripped of any excess, it’s a pure
exercise in experimentation by two technicians
who are at the peak of their abilities
and know it.
Curry’s main takeaway from the collaboration
is that while there’s value in honing his
work to perfection, his first instinct is usually
the right and most exciting one. “I knew
me and Kenny were good, but I didn’t know
that we were good enough to make an album
in three days. We didn’t plan it, it was just
on the fly. We figured out the sound, how we
wanted to package it, everything all at once.”
For Beats, UNLOCKED symbolizes the
way that creative discomfort and uncertainty
can be channeled into urgent, immediate
art. “The number one selling-solo piano
album of all time is Keith’s Jarrett’s Köln
Concert, and that was played on a broken,
detuned piano,” he muses. “The greatest
piano album of all time is on a broken instrument,
you see what I’m saying? Sometimes
it takes that discomfort to break through.
When you don’t know where you’re going,
where you can end up is boundless.”
By ISAAC NIKOLAI FOX
ARIS CHATMAN
COVER
“I KNEW ME AND KENNY WERE
GOOD, BUT I DIDN’T KNOW
THAT WE WERE GOOD ENOUGH
TO MAKE AN ALBUM IN THREE
DAYS. WE DIDN’T PLAN IT, IT
WAS JUST ON THE FLY. WE
FIGURED OUT THE SOUND”
DENZEL
18 26 BEATROUTE MARCH 2020