Album Review: Strictly 4 the Scythe by Denzel Curry & The Scythe
Denzel Curry reassembles the crew format he left at eighteen. The Scythe talks enormous shit for twenty minutes over beats thick enough to walk on that pays tribute to the South.
Thirteen years passed between Raider Klan dissolving and Denzel Curry announcing a new group in January 2026. He was fifteen when SpaceGhostPurrp brought him into that Carol City crew, a teenager rapping over lo-fi Memphis loops alongside Chris Travis, Xavier Wulf, and a Seattle kid named Key Nyata who had joined through the Thraxxhouse satellite. Raider Klan fell apart the way most early internet collectives did, quietly, with members scattering into solo careers and grudges nobody bothered resolving publicly. Curry left in 2013 and spent the next decade releasing six solo records, swinging between bruising party projects and introspective ones, building a fanbase that knew him as a singular artist. The fact that he went back to the crew model says something. Whether Strictly 4 the Scythe earns that return is a different conversation.
The Scythe is Curry, Ferg, TiaCorine, Bktherula, and Key Nyata. That lineup crosses generation gaps and geography in ways that look deliberate on paper. Ferg spent a decade in A$AP Mob, dropped the prefix in 2021, and released Darold in 2024, an LP named after his late father that got him taken seriously again after years of inconsistency. TiaCorine, from Winston-Salem, worked at Bojangles before “Lotto” went viral in 2018; she put out Corinian last year and appeared on Curry’s “Hot One” single with Ferg in 2024. Bktherula is twenty-three, Atlanta-raised, the daughter of a rapper, and she’s been uploading to SoundCloud since she was thirteen. Key Nyata had been off the radar for years. His reappearance through ULTRAGROUND, the label-slash-collective he co-founded with Curry, brought him back into Curry’s orbit after a decade of silence. On King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2, Nyata surfaced on “Ultra Shxt” doing a triplet flow that called back to Lord Infamous. The Scythe formalized what was already taking shape.
BNYX and his younger brother BRYVN (BeautifulMvn), both from Upper Darby outside Philadelphia, produced every track here. BNYX joined Working On Dying in 2021 and has since stacked credits with Drake, Travis Scott, and Yeat, including co-producing Drake’s number-one single “Slime You Out” in 2023. The brothers’ fingerprints are consistent to a degree that becomes both the tape’s steadiest quality and its chief limitation. Every beat thuds with the same low-frequency weight, percussion cracking through sub-bass that rattles without letting up. The keyboards stay minor-key and nocturnal. Three 6 Mafia’s early tapes haunt these songs at the level of murk and dread, the same sense of something moving through a dark room, without any of the sample-collage strangeness that made those originals feel possessed. “Phony” leans hardest into Memphis, its organ stabs and stripped drum pattern recalling Hypnotize Minds-era instrumentals. The Tay Keith-produced second half of “Hoopty” is the only moment where a different hand touches the boards, and it arrives like something stitched onto the tail of another song.
Most of what gets said on Strictly 4 the Scythe concerns money, fraud, and the consequences of approaching the group incorrectly. These are familiar subjects pushed through with varying levels of conviction. The sharpest writing belongs to Key Nyata, who consistently finds the one line per appearance that justifies the collaboration. On “Phony,” he talks about people who claim to be street but whose turf has no reach beyond their own imagination. “Mutt That Bih” gets his best writing on the whole tape. He raps about his morals shrinking, and that Ozempic bar compresses a whole decline-of-character arc into six words. He closes the same track, refusing to cross anyone who hasn’t crossed him first. Curry’s strongest showing is his second slot on “Lit Effect,” where he admits half the audience doesn’t recognize him yet, says he’s been saving money until it looks like pages, and finishes by spotting the weakness in the game and going after it. The last line on that performance, looking at someone and seeing unemployment, has the kind of clean hostility that made Curry’s best solo work crackle. Juicy J shows up on “Phony” sounding exactly how you’d predict. Unbothered, a little bit cruel, volunteering to hire your favorite rapper as his personal chauffeur around Los Angeles.
TiaCorine and Bktherula hold down their space on this tape without apology or cushioning. TiaCorine on the title cut says she fixes her lips to talk shit because it feels good, which is about as clean a self-description as any rapper has offered this year. She walks with a limp like a pimp, worries about designer while everybody else worries about rent, and sounds comfortable enough that none of it comes off rehearsed. On “Hoopty,” she spends a stack on a white tee and tells someone to spread their cheeks without breaking stride. Bktherula runs the official release of “Tan” from front to back. Her alias, Rue Santan, is in the hok, the persona, and the engine. She takes someone to see Spiderman at 8 and schedules head at 10, which is funny and specific in a way that most of the bragging elsewhere isn’t. Her cadence sits between singing and muttering, closer to cloud rap’s blurred-edge delivery than anything else in the tracklist, and it gives “Tan” a different pulse from every other cut. TiaCorine on the same song is filthier and more direct, but Bktherula’s half sets the tone.
Not every guest addition pulls its weight. “You Ain’t Gotta Lie” is the flattest stretch. 454 sings a hook about telling a girl she can come through without pretending, and then three appearances, from 454, Curry, and Luh Tyler, cover sex, spending, and pretty feet with no friction, no surprise, and no memorable phrasing. Luh Tyler brags about not needing to graduate, which might carry weight on a solo tape but vanishes inside a group effort that needs every minute to count. Rich the Kid on “Up” recites a list of luxury nouns, Molly, vintage Chanel, Eliantte ice, Lamborghini, without a single verb that catches or a single image that sticks. These two guests feel borrowed from a different Rolodex, brought in for name recognition rather than compatibility. On an eight-track list, dead weight stands out.
Ferg is the most uneven presence here and, for exactly one turn, the most affecting. Through most of Strictly 4 The Scythe he raps in brand inventories. Fruit Roll-Up paint on the car, bipolar-colored mink, rubies falling to his knees, Cartier bust. It’s fun enough on “The Scythe” and “Phony,” where the group momentum carries him. Then on the closer, “Up,” over SadBoi’s floating hook about vibing and doing butterflies, Ferg starts talking about a breakup. He wonders if they’ll get back together, mentions going from Atlanta to Santo Domingo, calls her mind the true cheat code, admits she’s the queen while he’s at the hoes, and says he misses the way she twerked. It is clumsy and honest in equal measure—a stretch that stumbles into sincerity after seven tracks of airtight swaggering. The relentless sameness of the subject matter can burn through for some, but when you have the beats and energy this good, you will not put this project down.
Favorite Track(s): “Lit Effect,” “Phony,” “Mutt That Bih”