BLKrKRT is a producer from Fort Worth who has been releasing music for about ten years, collaborating with artists like Tornup along the way. He is an artist who always has at least a few projects going, or at least has some interesting music in the vault. In November of last year, he gave us a collection of unreleased loops, breaks, and chops called Black Rock & Roll, which was all material that was recorded back in 2014. That was immediately followed up by a second volume, recorded in 2015. After a couple of months, BLKrKRT came back with more material in February of this year for Black Rock & Roll III, still recorded in 2015. Now he’s back once again, this time with material from 2015-2019, Black Rock & Roll IV.

Now, there are plenty of artists out there that when they release projects like this, they just feel like beat dumps. It’s then up to you to wade through all of these half-baked ideas and find the gems, if there are any buried within. When you get to an artist like BLKrKRT, however, who has a track record of releasing really interesting, challenging, and unique instrumental projects, you can rest assured that he’s not only picking some of his best material, but he is also making sure that everything works together and is sequenced just right to tell a musical story. What this means is that while you will certainly get some interesting individual tracks across the project, the really interesting stuff happens when you listen to the tracks playing off of each other and you get these connecting and contrasting musical ideas happening with these sample flips, loops, chops, manipulations, and more. As a result, it’s the type of project that you really want to listen to all the way through, preferably on headphones, where you can pick up on all of the interesting musical nuances that BLKrKRT is packing into this project. It comes together in a really unexpected and beautiful way.

Black Rock & Roll IV is a great continuation of an excellent instrumental series from BLKrKRT. He’s not just giving you some excellent unreleased material, he’s taking the time to carefully construct this release so that it becomes more than just the sum of its parts.