It’s a Monday afternoon and Denzel Curry is standing alone on stage in an otherwise empty rehearsal space, which has been blacked out and is so cavernous that you’d imagine it would echo. But the sounds are deadened by the walls; outside the padded door is an anonymous loading dock and then a bright, sweaty Hollywood afternoon. Inside, the rapper is testing out some new equipment and making last-minute tweaks to his setlist; it’s less than 24 hours before he’s scheduled to leave for tour, where he’s supporting Billie Eilish on 18 dates across Canada and the U.S. through the middle of July. He’s wearing a yellow hoodie, black pants, and sneakers, rapping songs that have yet to be released with roughly half the animation you assume he would give them in front of a crowd.

ADVERTISEMENT

Curry is 24 years old and performs under his given name. He was born and raised in Carol City, a section of Miami Gardens about 20 miles North of South Beach. (Sixty years ago Carol City was an unincorporated farming community; by the mid-2000s it was being used as a case study for threats to teenaged lives.) At the beginning of this decade, he distinguished himself as one of the most promising members of Raider Klan, the rap collective founded by the troubled but visionary producer SpaceGhostPurrp. Raider Klan’s music was conspicuously underground: it was buried under concocted tape hiss, mixed so that you could hear all the seams, and given cover art and album titles so gaudy and Gothic as to make mall attire seem genuinely sinister. The group was in many, often obvious, ways a tribute to early- and mid-‘90s Memphis rap, but it went beyond homage and is being bitten to varying degrees by artists famous and obscure to this day.

The music Curry has made since splitting from the Klan in 2013 has spiraled away from his stylistic origins, first gradually and then rapidly. Some records, like his 2013 debut album Nostalgic 64 or 32 Zel/Planet Shrooms, his double EP from two years later, seem like logical extensions of his earlier mixtapes. Then came Imperial, which was urgent and minimal, and last year’s Ta13oo, a dark, fraught record that showed off Curry’s abilities as a singer nearly as often as it mined what seemed like a tortured psyche.

ADVERTISEMENT

Despite being fluent in a handful of today’s most popular styles — and despite being more acrobatic and ambitious than most of his peers — Curry is rarely given credit as the synthesist he is. Instead he often finds himself on the receiving end of backhanded compliments from critics and fans, praised as being good for a Florida rapper or reduced to a product of the state’s SoundCloud scene. (The Apple Music page for Imperial describes Curry as “A Miami rapper with an East Coast MC’s furious mentality.”)

ZUU, his new album — out today — is fundamentally different from Ta13oo. The last record “was me coming from a depressed place,” Curry says. “This one came from me being homesick.” He originally wanted to call it Axis (“because it was gonna have everybody on tilt,” he says, laughing) but Curry eventually realized that he needed a title that served as a reference to his hometown, which was figuring largely in the record. “This is some real Miami stuff,” he says. ”You can tell from the intro all the way down: it goes from the sounds of where I grew up, to what I was raised around, to the people I was raised around, to the sounds that pretty much shaped the person I am. And then eventually, when you get to the last track, it’s the sounds that we do now.”

In conversation Curry, who is intense and introspective but has a drama student’s practiced ability to control a room, usually seems poised. But he does admit that the prospect of hitting the road with someone who’s quickly become one of the world’s most famous teenagers is daunting. “I’m just nervous as hell,” he says with a grin. “Billie sat me down and was like ‘No, bro, my fans are the most understanding fans ever.’ I was like, ‘Your fans are seven!’”

