BLKrKRT is a producer from Fort Worth who has been releasing music for a while, but he has really emerged in the past couple of years as one of the most intriguing artists making instrumental music. Just this past year, he released two challenging and rewarding projects, Black Rock & Roll and Black Rock & Roll II. Now he’s right back with Black Rock & Roll III.

As with the previous volumes, the beauty of Black Rock & Roll III is the way that BLKrKRT is able to not only reclaim the term “Rock & Roll” as Black music, but the way in which he’s also expanding the boundaries of what might be called “Rock & Roll” at the same time. He’s doing this by referencing through samples, taking a mix of early rock and roll and classic rock made by Black artists, and chopping them up and restructuring it into something new entirely. He’s then mixing in funk, free jazz, electronic music, hip hop, and more, and putting everything in conversation with each other. BLKrKRT is then taking everything to the next level in the way that he’s not only scrambling and remixing the history of Black music in the U.S., but the way in which his compositions are really pushing the boundaries of pop song structure. The way everything is arranged, it always feels at first like it might not come together, but given the vision, talent, and hard work that BLKrKRT is putting into these projects, it always comes out on the other side as something that not only works, it reaches moments of harmony that were completely unexpected and beautiful. It’s the type of album that you really need to sit with and give it your attention, but when you do, you won’t just be challenged, you’ll be rewarded with something that you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Black Rock & Roll III picks up right where BLKrKRT left off in 2021, creating instrumental hip hop that both calls upon the past and pushes the music into the future. It’s an incredible intellectual journey, but also one with deep emotional resonance.