Lord love the one-rapper/one-producer duo album. While the prevailing winds in hip-hop tend to push longer albums with many producers (often within the same song), there's also a booming cottage industry of smaller scale projects (see also: the Alchemist's output over the last few years).
Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats offer everything one would hope for from such a project, with a streamlined, sample-heavy series of soulful summer grooves that strut past in an action-packed 24 minutes.
ii is the follow-up to pair's electric 2020 collab UNLOCKED, and it came out on the same day as Weezer's Gold Album, also produced by Kenny Beats (under his legal name of Kenneth Blume). As Blume makes the unexpected shift into one of the most raw, organic producers of the rock-is-back movement, ii shows that he's still a vital voice in hip-hop who can hang with the best of 'em.
