Dissatisfaction is the parent of ambition. Both characteristics march in tandem across one of the finest rap albums of the year, Denzel Curry’s Melt My Eyez See Your Future. Released in March, it features some of the most far-reaching beats and bars in the Florida-raised rapper’s career. But discontent also runs through its songs.
“The whole point of Melt My Eyez See Your Future is to highlight the flaws of the world and the flaws in myself,” he explains, speaking by video call from Los Angeles, where he lives, before coming to the UK later this month to play the Reading and Leeds festivals. Wearing a stylish green shirt, he doodles from time to time on a pad as we speak. He has an elaborately sculpted hairstyle, which on the blurrily shot cover image of his album resembles a crown.
Curry has been tipped for great things since emerging in south Florida’s underground rap scene as a teenager. Now 27, he was one of the acts in hip-hop magazine XXL’s annual Freshman Class list in 2016, an influential launching-pad for US rappers. But while fellow freshmen from his year such as 21 Savage and Lil Yachty have become chart acts, Curry has struggled to translate critical acclaim into hits. That is one of the sources of his dissatisfaction.
In 2019, he was picked by Billie Eilish, a fan of his music, to support her on tour. It gave him a taste for playing arenas. Yet just a year later, he felt sufficiently disillusioned about his prospects to tweet a message reading: “I hate rapping.”
“That period of time I was just fed up with a lot of things, like the way I had been treated in music,” he says. He used to watch YouTube music reaction videos of people talking about his songs, saying they remembered Curry from the XXL Freshman issue but had never really listened to him.
“And I’m like — why? I never really understood that. You listened to everyone else, why you never give a chance to my music. I’m fire,” he says emphatically. “How can you sleep on that?”
Melt My Eyez See Your Future turns his frustrations to artistic advantage. Its scope demonstrates Curry’s versatility, rapping over beats that draw on jazz, psychedelia, Spaghetti Western scores, old-fashioned boom-bap and modern trap music. “This is not rap,” he announces in one of the songs, “this more like bebop.” In a sign of the exalted company that Curry matches himself against, the line echoes a lyric by the iconic rapper Nas.
Curry projects the quintessential hip-hop attribute of ultra-confidence. “Rap elite, I’m top tier,” he declares of himself on the album. “Yes, I am the best,” he assures me. But the songs also address struggles with depression, suicidal thoughts and his remorse at how he has treated women in the past. At one point, a lyric appears to allude to an episode of molestation that he has previously spoken of suffering as a child: “I’ve been touched before, way before I touched my . . . ”
“The majority of the time when I was writing this album, I was in a confused state of mind about myself and where I was positioned in the world,” he says. “I was barely praying to God. I would act like this self-righteous person when I was doing exactly the opposite of what I was preaching.”
On the album, themes of personal crisis intersect with social crisis. “The USA is a cold place,” he raps in a song. In another, he describes it as a “land designed to hate me”. A track called “John Wayne” is about a police officer swaggering through a black neighbourhood with a gun: “No remorse, I’ma give them boys pain.”
“It’s been like that for years,” he tells me. “They see a black dude down the street and they automatically assume he’s a thug, drug dealer, killer, pimp, instead of the one thing that really means the most, a human being.”
He has personal experience of the violence afflicting so many black communities. Curry grew up in Carol City, a district in Miami-Gardens, the city with the highest proportion of African-American people in Florida. One of his high school contemporaries was Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead at 17 in 2012 while returning home from a convenience store after being confronted by an armed neighbourhood watch volunteer. The killing sparked a national uproar.
“It scared the hell out of me when that happened to him because — oh man, that could have been anyone of us,” Curry says. An ardent fan of Japanese anime, he drew a commemorative picture of Martin for the boy’s parents. “And then a couple of years later my brother dies from police brutality.” His brother, Treon Johnson, died after being tasered by Florida police in 2014.
He is scathing towards social-media warriors posting online activism about Black Lives Matter without doing anything concrete towards it: “Like bro, go on the street, you ain’t on the frontline. People are using it as an opportunity to promote themselves, like ‘I’m with the struggle’.” However, he believes that music can make a difference.
“That’s what our job as musicians and artists is, we build awareness. Our job is to use our voices to get more people to recognise and understand. Because the majority of rap fans are white. There are black rap fans, but the majority of them you see at shows are white. My fans are all colours and all races and all genders.”
Curry’s early recordings were abrasive and aggressive. Before going solo, he was a member of Raider Klan, a loose-knit Carol City collective that was influential in a murky, lo-fi sub-genre called SoundCloud rap. He adopted a gothic image, staring out from the cover of his 2018 album TA13OO with ghostly white face paint. Its track “Sirens” featured an uncredited vocal from a pre-fame Eilish.
With Melt My Eyez See Your Future, he has managed to open up a more expansive space for himself. “This whole album is about growth,” he says. In its hinterland lies his decision to start seeing a therapist in the late 2010s, to make sense of his mingled ambitions and dissatisfactions.
“I realised there are a lot of things I can’t do alone,” he says. “I needed somebody to talk to. I needed somebody to hold me accountable. I needed people that were around me to make me a better person. But it’s really on me at the end of the day. I will grow, you’re going to see it.”
Denzel Curry performs at Leeds Festival on August 26 and Reading Festival on August 28, readingandleedsfestival.com
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