Denzel Curry'z UNLOCKED Review

By Josh Sholes

Denzel Curry’s most recent project, UNLOCKED, is a multimedia collaboration with beloved producer Kenny Beats. The eight track album is accompanied by an animated short, in which Denzel and Kenny travel into Kenny’s computer in a quest to find their leaked album—a plot very reminiscent of The Matrix. The short provides psychedelic visuals to accompany the equally experimental album, as well as emphasizing Denzel’s well documented anime influences. 

While the album lacks substantial narrative and high concept lyrics, it does a fantastic job of accentuating Denzel’s technical acumen. Throughout the album he consistently changes pitches—the best examples of this is on the track “Take_it_Back_v2”—while synchronously emulating the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the former superstar DMX. Denzel’s disjointed flow pairs perfectly with Kenny’s unusual, choppy beats, creating a mesmerizing journey for the listener. The many stylistically atypical intro and outros on the album seem as if they were appropriated directly from MF DOOM’s iconic discography. The juxtaposition of these retro-sounding samples next to Kenny’s rugged, techno, and psychedelic beats adds to the album’s welcome eccentricity. The pair’s desire to stray away from current music trends and styles is a welcome direction, as the album as a whole feels like a fresh, neoteric listening experience. Kenny and Denzel appear to be influenced by Kendrick Lamar’s compilation album untitled unmastered on the track “Track07,” by using sampled vocals and interludes utilized at various points throughout the album. 

 For the duration of his discography, Denzel has proven that his hard, venerable flow can be the perfect vessel for storytelling and discussing profound, personal topics. However, Denzel used UNLOCKEDas an opportunity to accentuate his more braggadocios tendencies. On the track “DIET_” Denzel takes a shot at Logic with the following bar, “You gotta milk the game, son, I couldn’t bottle feed you/This next bar was ‘bout to do some Logic shit/But now I gotta stop the shit and let me pop my shit.” In the preceding lines, Denzel imitated Logic’s flow from the 2013 XXL freshman cypher and is definitively taking a shot at Logic for his decline in quality lyrical content in recent years. 

Throughout the entirety album, Denzel drops innumerable references, with topics ranging from video games to cinema to historical allusions. Denzel makes many references to two of George Lucas’s iconic franchises, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. An additional film franchise that gets a shout-out is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as Denzel spits a hook about Thanos, the central villain from Marvel’s Infinity Saga. Moreover, Denzel has many bars about a few quintessential video games such as, the Fallout franchise, Grand Theft Auto, and Nintendo properties, among others. Denzel also mentions a few prominent black historical figures such as Frederick Douglas and Malcolm X. 

Overall, this project is a refreshing experience that differentiates itself from the ubiquitous flood of stylized rap being disseminated through mainstream audiences in the quest for commercial success. It is exceedingly apparent that Denzel and Kenny put a great deal of inventiveness into this multimedia masterpiece, as the music and animation flow together seamlessly while also functioning as exquisite standalone pieces of art.