Album Review: Spiral Staircases by Larry June, Curren$y & The Alchemist
Two of rap’s most prolific independents and its best loop-digger pool their catalogues. The fit is so seamless it barely leaves a pulse.
Collaborative albums between rappers who share a producer tend to arrive already half-finished in people’s heads, especially when both rappers have spent years circling the same loops separately. Larry June and The Alchemist made The Great Escape in 2023 and Life Is Beautiful with 2 Chainz in 2025. Curren$y and The Alchemist go back further, to Covert Coup in 2011 and Continuance in 2022. June and Curren$y have traded guest spots and loose tracks for nearly as long. The triangulation was obvious, and fans spent months speculating about it before we even got a single. Spiral Staircases satisfies that anticipation cleanly if unspectacularly. Three catalogs built on regularity and marginal gains fold into one another with almost no friction, which is both the album’s accomplishment and its limitation.
Every beat on Spiral Staircases lets the sample decay hang a second longer than expected, the percussion tapping where another producer would punch. On “Stars on the Roof,” a muted organ riff circles underneath Larry’s verse with the patience of someone waiting in a parked car. “Drive Alone” wraps a piano figure in enough reverb that the notes smear into each other, and the drums hang back, content to mark time while the rappers talk. The production gives both emcees what they need, which is lateral room to stretch a thought across eight bars without fighting for space in the mix. The Alchemist built rooms this way on Covert Coup and The Great Escape too, and the tradeoff is that the project sustains a single emotional temperature for most of its run. When the “Palo Santo” beat drops a heavier kick and a slightly sharper snare into the second half, the shift registers more than it probably should, simply because everything around it stays so level.
Larry June writes about money the way a bookkeeper thinks about it. On “Everything Allocated,” he accounts for his overhead like he’s reading a balance sheet aloud: cash for the bill, assets purchased with the children in mind, very little clientele but consistent turnover, a million off three zips with no assists. The boasts never inflate into fantasy because they stay tethered to process. He calculates in his sleep, he says, and you believe him because nothing in his delivery suggests otherwise. His turn on the title track carries the same arithmetic into a different register. He spends $1.2 million renovating land, flies a woman from the East Coast for sushi, grills filet mignon on the deck, and counts hundreds in latex gloves in the kitchen.
The domestic and the illicit share a sentence because in his world they share a schedule. When he lands on “I’m on the money like ‘In God We Trust,’” it sounds like prayer. On “Palo Santo,” his most unguarded moment, he admits to wondering whether the life is really meant for him, recalls a one-way Greyhound out of Arizona and a teardrop on his face. Then, in the same breath, he pivots to an SF90 with the chinky eyes and Palo Santo burning while he counts dollars in the morning. The doubt dissolves back into the routine because the routine is what rescued him from the doubt.
Most of the album’s actual tension belongs to Curren$y, who describes danger with the cadence of someone reporting mild weather. On “Drive Alone,” he narrates the specific mechanics of envy from inside your own circle, tracing how jealousy disguises itself as help, how a friend crept on his own kind because he felt left behind. “Genocide from your own side” arrives without any dramatic pause, buried inside a verse about Spyders and hate and solitary commutes, his voice never climbing above room temperature.
On “2.P.I.G.,” he warns about treacherous company through a chess analogy and then tells the story of Wes trying to knock Ace because Ace said he wasn’t eating. That shorthand, borrowed from a very specific street grammar, sits next to “kaleidoscope on the coffee table, look at things from all angles” without any seam between the two. His contribution to “Stars on the Roof” opens on joy and pain, moves through million-dollar headstone graves and carbon-fiber steering wheels. “Empty Pages” is where The Alchemist picks up a mic, and his appearance bends the album at an unexpected angle. He talks about leaving a plate with a piece of steak out so all the wolves stay fed, about a briefcase guaranteed to be full of bread, about purchasing merchandise only after it’s been opened and inspected.
The title track’s chorus is the album’s clearest self-portrait: “Spiral staircases/No prints, these the actual paintings/‘Cause we actually made it/Bitch, we actually players.” The security gate on the mansion, the stash spot forty miles from the main property, the balcony where Larry sits writing “all type of shit” and feeling like a novelist. Access is gated, and the wealth is deliberately quiet. And the language for cars, watches, and weapons runs in the same current as the language for prayer, children’s futures, and careful speech. Larry warns that “words too loose could quickly form into a noose” on the title track, and Curren$y finishes a sentence about Ferraris by swearing they’re real and that he’s being sincere. The tape never dips into anything bad, but it occasionally dips into something forgettable, and on a seven-song album, there is less margin for autopilot than on the twenty-song projects these artists typically release.
Favorite Track(s): “Drive Alone,” “Palo Santo,” “Empty Pages”