It’s easy to stick to the plan when you’re seeing immediate returns. But for Kurious, the uncommonly gifted rapper from New York City’s Upper West Side, perseverance has been an act of faith. Despite being hailed as one of hip-hop’s most compelling lyricists for going on three decades, his life has been filled with the kinds of twists and turns that might cause another artist to hang it up and look for a more stable career. Sometimes, though, the call of the art is too strong. “I didn’t do Kurious justice,” he says today, of the period before his current resurgence. So now, settling old scores is a matter of grit and determination. “I don’t have the luxury to not be inspired,” he goes on. “I love this shit, and I got a chip on my shoulder.”
Now, as he prepares for the release of his new album, Majician—the nickname his peers blessed him with a generation ago—Kurious is well on his way to establishing the legacy he’s long deserved. Due out September 20, 2024 on Metalface Records and Rhymesayers Entertainment, the LP, which was executive produced by his longtime friend and collaborator MF DOOM before his passing, is a mesmerizing blend of technical wizardry and personal introspection. Take “Eye of Horus,” where the pulsing drums convey an urgency that borders on panic; Kurious weaves a complex tapestry of history and insight, but does so while ducking through and under each pocket in the beat. To hear him tell it, songs like this are the product of that dogged work ethic—the only tool adequate to unlock years of refinement and lived experience. “Sometimes I’m up all night, and it won’t hit me until 4 in the morning,” he says. “Then from 4 to 6, I get that burst I need.”
Kurious grew up in Manhattan Valley, near 97th and Amsterdam. “I loved it,” he says of the neighborhood, despite its difficulties. “It was rough in them times; now it’s a luxury neighborhood. Coming up, it was the hood. In Harlem and East Harlem, it was more segregated back then. But UWS, that was more Black and Puerto Rican, all mixed together.” He credits his mother, who as a 13-year-old orphan from Puerto Rico made the trek to New York despite not speaking English. She would eventually earn a master’s degree, all while providing for her family. “My mom never let me feel like we lacked anything,” Kurious recalls. “When my sneaker had a hole I got a new sneaker.”
Even before “Rapper’s Delight” hit the airwaves and codified the genre as a commercial enterprise, hip-hop was exploding out of Manhattan Valley. “You got Rocksteady Park right there, Zulu nation right there,” Kurious remembers. “It was a hotbed for hip-hop. In my building they’d have this thing called Game Night in the community room. The older kids would have their turntables plugged in, and they’d have mics, and they’d be saying rhymes and cutting breaks back and forth. When I first heard someone rapping on a beat, that shit was so funky to me. That shit just grabbed me by the neck and never let go.”
By his early 20s, Kurious was already an in-demand voice on the mic. His 1994 major label debut album, A Constipated Monkey, is a classic of its style, marked by heavy beats and nimble rhymes that are razor-sharp yet frequently hilarious. Despite not releasing a new solo LP for the rest of the decade, Kurious continued to be sought after; rap fans the world over know him for his verse on “?,” one of the standout songs from DOOM’s heralded Operation: Doomsday. But something wasn’t sitting exactly right with him. “After like ‘95, God stopped me,” Kurious says. “It was like I had a spiritual awakening. My people could still get verses out of me, that’s when I did “?,” that’s when I did stuff with MF Grimm. But I just got hit with a new reality. Writing was like a kid learning to walk again. I was seeing everything differently, questioning my writing more.”
It was the relationship with his most notorious collaborator, however, that kept beckoning him back to the game. “DOOM would be like, so what you got? I would say a rhyme, and he would be like that’s crazy. But I wasn’t confident enough or settled into my reality.” For years, Villain would send through little life rafts: an email with a beat and an open slot for a verse attached. Often, these came with a feature fee; Kurious recalls the time he was planning a move, and writing a 16 for his old friend covered the security deposit.
But with DOOM barred from the United States due to immigration issues, the two were prevented from reuniting in person until 2016, when Kurious flew down to meet him in Grenada. It was there that he played DOOM “Unknown Species,” the urgent track that would eventually serve as the opening salvo on Majician. Over more trips to Grenada and eventually the United Kingdom, the LP took shape, two kindred spirits chipping away at a block of marble together. “I don’t have another creative partner in life,” Kurious says. “He’s that for me.” So it’s only natural that this project, the last document of their remarkable chemistry, would find a home with Metalface Records.
The beats on Majician were all crafted by Mono En Stereo. Kurious had been following the prolific producer’s work since 2010, but it wasn’t until 2016 that he finally recorded a few songs to his tracks, and the two quickly found a working rhythm from there. “He just started sending me so many beats,” Kurious recalls. “It finally clicked and I felt I had found my home sound. And sonically it’s similar to what DOOM always did—raw, gritty samples, stripped-down—but with the right switches, it’s just right.”
Majician is filled with songs that dance on the line between confession and confrontation. Album opener “Unknown Species” sets the stage with an urgent stream of conscious status report setting drum breaks ablaze. “Eye of Horus” delivers laser focused reflections, while “Separation Anxiety” is a personal bloodletting in the form of lyrical exercise. Meanwhile, “Par For the Course,” which features the elusive Mr. Fantastik, makes drum breaks from the early Reagan era sound totally revitalized.
Through it all—and despite the radical amount of work Kurious put into the writing and recording of this material—he was careful to not scrutinize his process in a way that would dull its, well, magic. “You gotta keep that window open for the unknown shit,” he says. “Music is not thinking—it’s all feeling and all mystery.” True though that may be, Kurious has removed all the ambiguity from the question of whether he can stand as one of the premier MCs of his time.
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