Wiki
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Release Date
7 February 2020
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Length
8 tracks
UNLOCKED is the first collaborative project between friends Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats, released on February 7, 2020, by PH Recordings and Loma Vista Recordings, and the follow-up to their first collaboration on the twelfth and final episode of the first season of Kenny’s series "The Cave", released in August 2019. The project is divided into two sides of four songs each.
The collaborative album was announced the day before its official release on February 7, 2020, with the release of a 20-minute animated film titled "UNLOCKED". Throughout the comic film, the two friends embark on a digital adventure to retrieve the various files of a leaked project, revealing a total of eight songs during each stage of their quest.
While Denzel Curry was touring for his 2018 album, TA13OO, his manager, Mark Maturah, expressed interest in pairing Curry in a recording booth with Kenny Beats. Over a few sessions, the two made 2 to 4 songs, but none of the material stood out to Curry or Beats. Curry recalled that "We had a song called 'Spade' that was hard but it wasn’t breaking any boundaries or setting any trends." The two had a feud over one of these beats being used by another artist as it was supposed to be used on Curry's 2019 album ZUU, causing Curry to hate Kenny for "months".
After some time, people reached out to Curry to have him watch Freddie Gibbs' appearance on The Cave, a bi-weekly freestyle series hosted by and uploaded onto YouTube by Beats. Curry had a positive reaction to the episode's freestyle section and called Kenny Beats, prompting their first dialogue since their aforementioned feud. In August 2019, Denzel Curry appeared on an episode of The Cave and was immediately followed up by the pair recording Unlocked.
The tracklist looking the way it does was both intentional and unintentional. According to Beats, on the last day of recording the album he opened the project on his iTunes and the tracklist had all sorts of unusual signs and symbols. Deciding that this would contribute to the energy and feeling of the project, he and Denzel chose to leave the titles the way they were.
Stereogum and Complex reported that the recording session lasted three days. However, Pitchfork and Consequence of Sound reported that the album's recording took place over a 24-hour period. In an interview with Pigeons & Planes, Kenny Beats mentioned the three day frame of the project's recording, stating "72 hours sounds crazy when you're working at a normal pace but that can happen when someone works as hard as Denzel." Curry mentioned that "Kenny cancelled everybody else’s sessions to dedicate time to this. When you get to Kenny's studio, it's a real vibe. Ain't no fuckery gonna go down in there. He's on go on the keyboard and the pads, and I'm on go with my vocals." In the Pigeons & Planes interview, the duo mentioned Madlib, Stones Throw Records, and the Wu-Tang Clan as influences on the project's sound. Kenny's production on the project was noted by multiple outlets for its inclusion of samples.
Curry and Kenny Beats intentionally chose to have a lack of singles for the project. Curry stated in a video interview, "there's no singles, like, the project is the single." Going along with this creative choice led the two to develop the concept of an accompanying short film for the project. Deciding on no singles for the project, but still needing to "figure out a way to get people to tune into something long-form", the two engaged in a fake online beef on Instagram Live and Twitter in order to build up hype.
On March 5, 2021, the remix album UNLOCKED 1.5 was released, including guest appearances from Smino, Joey Bada$$, and Benny the Butcher, among others.
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