Kenny Beats - LOUIE (Vinyl)

Though best known for producing seminal full-length albums for some of the world’s most exciting artists (including Vince Staples, IDLES, Rico Nasty and Denzel Curry), on LOUIE Kenny subverts expectations with an almost entirely instrumental artist record that acts as a deeply personal tribute to his ailing father.

In fact LOUIE was never meant for the world's ears.

While quarantined in Bath, England, thousands of miles from home, Kenny Beats received cataclysmic news. With bleak energy looming in the air due to the sorrow of a breakup compounded by the isolation of COVID, a UK trip to produce for IDLES offered an escape: the opportunity to produce for his favourite rock band and find respite in art and unfamiliar surroundings. Then came the call that his father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The relationship between Kenneth Blume II and his son and namesake – best known to the world as Kenny Beats – had long been loving but fraught. However, his solace, much like his sons, was always music. While his broadcasting dreams never came to fruition, Kenneth made mixtapes for friends and family, offering DJ-style interludes between the eclectic curation: Sade melting into Willie Nelson gliding into Dr. Dre. When news of his father’s illness hit Kenny, he found himself constantly returning to these tapes to process his grief and feel familial connectivity in a remote locale. The mixes didn’t merely offer reassuring anthems, they transported him back to times that felt simpler–before the turbulence of the last two decades took its toll.

The time spent with those mixes bore an idea. Kenny resolved to create a gift for his father. The result is LOUIE, an album indicative of the unremitting love felt from child-to-parent – a heart-on-sleeve appreciation for his dad’s sacrifices and willingness to nurture his son’s talent, created over the course of the month of December 2020.

LOUIE presents a side of Kenny that has not been seen by the world before. Charismatic, self-effacing and generous, the album reveals the duality of the artist - an enigmatic, introspective searcher who has experienced pain and duress, and alchemized it via looped samples and hypnotic drum patterns. LOUIE gives testament to our most personal thoughts, recollections and stories. It is an intimate and personal gift that achieves the rarest condition - a sense of the universal.