Bloodmoney Perez is an artist who has been putting out music for over a decade. He’s bounced around a little bit, but he’s now based in Alaska. Back in January of this year, he put out an album with producer Messiah Musik on Filthy Broke Records called Second-Hand Accounts. As it happened, there were a few songs that didn’t make the cut for the album, but Perez still believed in them and didn’t want to see them vanish. Initially, he just planned to release a couple of singles and call it a day, but as he sat with the material and began working on other stuff, he realized that he had another coherent project on his hands. That project is now being released as Curses.

Messiah Musik produces the majority of the album here, obviously, but then we get an assist from Iceberg Theory on a few tracks, who helps give the album the push over the finish line that it needed. As this really is a continuation of Second-Hand Accounts, you get plenty of hard-hitting underground beats, with enough variety to take you from the psychedelic to the 8-bit sampling and everything in between. This fits Perez to a tee, with his resonant voice and clear, steady flow on the mic. It’s an intense listening experience, with plenty of abstract poetry meeting up with moments of anger, frustration, loss, which then intersect with some good old fashioned shit talking as well. We get two moments of guest artists, the first being the posse cut of “Dante’s Inferno,” itself a reworking of “Hades” from Second-Hand Accounts, featuring AJ Suede, Sleep Sinatra, and Blue. The second comes on The 50x50s RMX of “Curses,” which not only reminds everyone that Sketch the Cataclysm is a badass on the mic with one hell of a dexterous flow, he provides a really nice complement to Perez on the mic, the way their different registers and flows play off of each other on the track.

Curses is a little bit of an unexpected album for Bloodmoney Perez, but it’s one that a veteran artist like him could pull off. He knew he had something with these left over tracks, and he found a way to get the project over the finish line without sacrificing quality. It’s a solid album from an artist who has been around the block once or twice and put in the work to get this project to the level it needed to be at.