“YO SHAN, I DON’T EVEN KNOW where the venue’s at, my guy!”, Denzel Curry is asking for directions to huge music venue Terminal 5 in his best impression of a New York accent. Itʼs the weekday lunch rush in Midtown Manhattan, and the Florida rapper is cracking joke after joke as heʼs having his photos taken. “Not the glizzy stand! You canʼt be serious!” he quips after the photographer suggests a shot in front of a Sabrett hot dog cart on the corner.
Even in a sea of pedestrians and sensory overload, it’s hard for Denzel to blend in – beyond his signature wick hairstyle being a dead giveaway, his animated personality and confident stature draw curious onlookers. “The name’s Terrence Jenkins,” he deadpans, before cracking a mischievous grin for a starstruck fan. “Just kidding.” As we walk the next long stretch, Denzel tells me he overslept because he had a long night bowling with friends in the Lower East Side. “We had two lanes and the place was playing nothing but early 2000s music – that was funny as hell,” he says. “The energy was electric, the shots kept coming, and everybody’s adrenaline was up.” Running on just a few hours of sleep on the last leg of his tour, somehow, he’s wide awake and still “on”, soundtracking our walk with more jokes, freestyles, and special sound effects. Denzel’s manager Mark, who he’s been working with for the past decade, lets out a subdued chuckle when I mention the 27-year-old rapper’s endurance. “Yep, that’s Denzel.”
Alter egos aside, there’s no place better than the birthplace of hiphop to get to know, his first solo album. His latest, , feels like a natural culmination for the rapper, who first turned heads with songs that nod to the aforementioned MCs, laced with Memphis bounce. Like with all things he’s passionate about – Japanese culture, Muay Thai, and comic books among them – Denzel has a penchant for breaking things down: “I wanted people to understand the aesthetics of hip-hop that derive from jazz and bebop. Trip-hop, hip-hop, boombap, RnB, all somehow made their way onto the album,” Denzel says of – his most introspective, refined album yet – and its Deluxe B-Side of live music renditions. “I’m talking about everything that happens right in front of me, but I do it in a way that is very unconventional. I don’t want to be the traditional rapper – or, I guess, musician. ’Cause that’s how you push things forward.” With being critically acclaimed as one of 2022’s best works, it’s still an understatement to call Denzel Curry’s current chapter his victory lap: as a pioneer of the South Florida scene that birthed SoundCloud rap, the RVIDXR KLVN alma mater’s legacy was cemented before he’d even got started. “It couldn’t have come at a better time – possibly the worst time of my life,” Denzel says of his musical beginnings and subsequent membership of the rap collective. “I was 16 and was just kicked out of art school. Me making my first tapes and creating the work, art and all that stuff was my ultimate revenge plan.” Mark and Denzel connected via Facebook shortly after KLVN head SpaceGhostPurrp released ‘Creep Creep Devils 93.’ “I really needed a manager, and Mark stepped in for real,” Denzel says. “He had a whole plan mapped out, typing everything, a whole plan over Facebook, telling me what we were going to do from the beginning. I was just like, ‘Aight, let’s do this shit. Fuck it.’ We went through everything together, from getting pulled over with police at midnight in the Miami Shores and shit, to the gold beat-up Lexus we drove around giving out all types of stuff.”
