Granddad Woolly is an emcee from Atlanta who has been releasing music since the beginning of the decade. Back in 2015, he paired up with Portuguese producer CHIKANO to release an EP called EXPRMNTS I-VI. This was supposed to serve as the introduction to a larger project between the two, but after a while it seemed like it was never going to come. That is, until that magical day when it suddenly appears in your inbox four years later, and now we all have KanoDadda: EXPRMNT VII.

If the first EP four years ago were experiments, then this album at least feels like an upper division lab experiment – the lab where you get to use the expensive equipment and do difficult calculations on computers. On EXPRMNT VII, Woolly and CHIKANO are no longer feeling each other out or just seeing what works, they are pushing each other based on knowledge of the music and each other’s natural inclinations and abilities. While they experimented with sci-fi and horror imagery in the past, they are now able on this album to give us a fully formed vision of an eerie world that harkens back to something of a 1930s horror film, complete with mad scientists and monsters and paranoia. Through doing this, CHIKANO is able to craft some great boom bap that balances this uneasy and dark tone with some funky beats that still bang at the same time. Where this album really succeeds, though, is the ways in which Granddad Woolly is able to take this template, use all these sounds and imagery, and then push the form to ask the big philosophical questions of life and death and our greatest fears. It’s the level of work that moves the album from simply being some nerdy hip hop fun to an album that transcends subgenre. It becomes an album that I would recommend to all hip hop fans, because it delivers on all levels.

Granddad Woolly and CHIKANO have great chemistry together and I’m glad they stuck with it to create this album, even if it took longer than expected, because the pay off is there. EXPRMNT VII lives up to the potential of making a horror-themed hip hop album that hits on all the right notes, and in doing so it no longer lives as a niche album.