Call me old-fashioned, but I like it when rappers make rap albums. Nothing in this life is certain, but I feel pretty confident when I say that Buffalo beast Conway The Machine will never put out an LP of soft-batch house music. Instead, Conway continues to craft hard scrunch-face shit-talk, and he’s extremely good at it. Earlier this year, Conway released his Shady Records debut, the excellent and surprisingly vulnerable God Don’t Make Mistakes. Last month, a mysterious new Conway EP called Organized Grime 2 came out. Today, we get another whole new Conway album.
Conway has a nice little thing going with rap blogger-turned-producer Big Ghost LTD. In the past two years, Conway and Big Ghost have gotten together to release two albums, 2020’s No One Mourns The Wicked and 2021’s If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed. Those Big Ghost albums are relatively low-impact for Conway, and they tend to fly under the radar, but they’re all great. Conway grabs these moody deep-nod beats and just sinks his teeth in.
Today, Conway and Big Ghost have released What Has Been Blessed Cannot Be Cursed, their third collaborative record. Once again, it’s a pretty low-stakes thing — not too long, no obvious singles, just two people doing what they do. It’s just such a pleasure to hear this guy rap. (He raps a lot about sniffing coke on this one, which is a little concerning, but I’m not here to judge Conway.) Method Man, Jae Skeese, and a few others make guest appearances, but Conway is the whole show here. Stream the album below.
What Has Been Blessed Cannot Be Cursed is out now, and you can get it at Bandcamp.
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