In his own telling, the debut album by Kenneth Charles Blume III shouldn’t exist. He’s best known as Kenny Beats, a hip-hop producer whose CV ranges from Vince Staples to Jpegmafia to Slowthai, and is something of an internet celebrity, too. He’s racked up millions of views for his YouTube series the Cave, on which Blume makes a beat on the hoof and guest artists, including Doja Cat, Lil Yachty and Freddie Gibbs, freestyle over it; Billie Eilish and Skrillex have appeared as judges on his Twitch channel “beat battles”, where unknown producers fight it out to win equipment.
Despite his productivity, Kenny Beats has said he had no ambition to make a solo album on the grounds that he “didn’t have anything to say”, a noble sentiment that’s never stopped many musicians. His mind was apparently changed when he found himself unexpectedly quarantined in Bath – he was working on Idles’ fourth album, Crawler – and received the news that his father had been diagnosed with cancer.
