Despite being hailed as one of hip-hop’s most compelling lyricists for going on three decades, his life has been filled with the kinds of twists and turns that might cause another artist to hang it up and look for a more stable career. Sometimes, though, the call of the art is too strong. “I didn’t do Kurious justice,” he says today, of the period before his current resurgence. So now, settling old scores is a matter of grit and determination. “I don’t have the luxury to not be inspired,” he goes on. “I love this shit, and I got a chip on my shoulder.”
By his early 20s, Kurious was already an in-demand voice on the mic. His 1994 major label debut album, A Constipated Monkey, is a classic of its style, marked by heavy beats and nimble rhymes that are razor-sharp yet frequently hilarious. Despite being hailed as one of hip-hop’s most compelling lyricists, he didn’t release another solo LP for the rest of that decade, but he continued to be sought after. Rap fans the world over know him for his verse on “?,” one of the standout songs from his longtime friend and collaborator MF DOOM’s heralded Operation: Doomsday.
The beats on Majician were all crafted by Mono En Stereo. Kurious had been following the prolific producer’s work since 2010, but it wasn’t until 2016 that he finally recorded a few songs to his tracks, and the two quickly found a working rhythm from there. “He just started sending me so many beats,” Kurious recalls. “It finally clicked and I felt I had found my home sound. And sonically it’s similar to what DOOM always did—raw, gritty samples, stripped-down—but with the right switches, it’s just right.”
Through the radical amount of work Kurious put into the writing and recording of this material, he’s removed all ambiguity from the question of whether he can stand as one of the premier MCs of his time. | 
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