Nine tracks in twenty four minutes with no wasted time, filler or preamble, ii gets right into it. A concise and sunny reassertion of golden age hip-hop that’s extremely fun and asks very little of you beyond putting your hands in the air.

Six years after UNLOCKED, Denzel Curry and Kenneth Blume (formerly Kenny Beats) are back together. The beats are tape-degraded and slightly out of tune, built on old instrumental soul and funk samples, and clips that feel like they’ve been lifted from pre-Loony Tunes Merrie Melodies cartoons, warm and wobbly. This cartoony quality sits perfectly alongside Curry’s affable delivery, with quick and bouncy lyrical proficiency worn as lightly as a great runner making a sprint look effortless. Flipping his tongue over and over in the tradition of Chali 2na, this is the opposite of xanied out mumble rap.

GONE FISHING opens with a guitar solo running all the way through it that’s warm and loose, and EVIL GRIN invites JPEGMAFIA along. CANDLELIGHT showcases old soul samples and BENJAMIN is a more reflective moment of breathing space. DIFFERENCE closes the record with Yebba’s floating chorus, the hardest and hypest track on the record, perfect for a car radio in the sun. The warmth of De La Soul and Jurassic 5 runs through both the production and the delivery, with that joyful quality that made golden age hip-hop feel like a celebration rather than a political statement. Denzel Curry is one of the most versatile rappers and this record finds him in a purely fun and sunny mode.

You can hear a Ludacris influence in the delivery, but without the sleaze, as Curry brags with an unthreatening and unthuggish swagger. Thematically, the lyrics sit in familiar territory, describing life around him, battling his own thoughts, whether you can trust the people around you and the vipers that emerge as success arrives, in a tradition that goes all the way back to Slick Rick. Affable and light, Curry sits outside the gun-focused world that’s dominated the genre, with universal topics and a delivery so fast that the meaning can easily glide past you in a flurry of words.

The oldest themes of integrity, ego, and keeping your head together are handled with thoughtfulness, and the deliberate choice to make music that sounds like it was ripped from old copies is a specific decision to root this record in a warm texture, and make it feel like it belongs to the tradition. There’s positivity and hopefulness running throughout that makes it possible to hold difficult messages about watching your back and people who are out to get you without losing any of the light. It’s a record for anyone with space in their heart for the warmest hip-hop.

ii doesn’t feel like it’s chasing any current trends, and instead feels consciously nostalgic. A deliberate attempt to revive the kind of beat making that defined hip-hop’s formative years, with stitched samples and warmth running through everything. Any of this material would be fantastic to hear in a club or at a live show, bouncing along with everyone around you.