The Elephant Man’s Bones was a true event album—a long-rumored, highly anticipated meeting of two hip-hop legends. It delivered on the hype in surprising fashion: a minimalist opus that shivered and smoldered more than it slapped. Though it bore the stylistic markings of its creators, Roc Marciano and the Alchemist, the album felt distinct in their respective catalogs. Instead of mangled soul loops and hard-edged boom-bap, this was mafioso rap tuned by Tibetan singing bowls; Al provided a pineal gland-stimulating airiness through which Marci floated like the ghost of a kingpin. Two years later, after attending to their solo careers, Al and Marci return with The Skeleton Key, a weirder, bleaker, more hermetically sealed take on prestige street rap. There’s no bloat, no guests, and no superfluous sounds. Each of its 10 songs feels like peering around a dark corner, an inescapable menace saturating every moment.
After finding a collective voice with The Elephant Man’s Bones, the pair settled into a comfortable rhythm, capitalizing on a long-simmering artistic connection. “We always making music,” Marci explained to Rolling Stone. “I’m always sitting on a batch of beats from Al.” Their near-constant workflow makes The Skeleton Key the product of a shared musical syntax that only comes from a deep and constant creative practice. On this leaner, meaner second record, Al’s beats are spacious yet brittle, peeling the layers from samples until only a groove remains. Marci writes with laser-cut precision, his exploded-view rhyme schemes locking together like the gears of an expensive wristwatch. When a song has a chorus, it usually bookends one long, sinister soliloquy. Everything adds up to a nearly unbreakable tension.
If The Elephant Man’s Bones was the soundtrack to a one-last-job jewelry heist, The Skeleton Key is the white-knuckle, bullet-sweating aftermath. Alchemist excels at pinpointing the most unnerving parts of a song—a minor-key piano modulation here, a restless drum fill there—and looping them to intensify their unease: Consider the chilling, dissonant, four-chord vamp that carries “Chopstick” or the blaring horn that slices through gentle Rhodes noodling on “Street Magic.” “Chateau Josué” has an anagogic quality, as if its greasy synth line and persistent kick were part of a ritual to wake the dead. Most striking is “Cryotherapy,” a wind tunnel of moaning vocals and what sounds like a harp glissando compressed into a ghostly shriek. Drums, if present at all, often feel several rooms away. Voices are recognizably human but bent into uncanny shapes. It’s some of Al’s most spartan work, but still as colorful, psychedelic, and hair-raising as a giallo death scene.
Marci remains steely-eyed throughout, his detached monotone never betraying emotion. He is the aloof assassin, the kind of cold-blooded professional who has a favorite bulletproof vest. His boasts are outlandish, like the claim on “Chateau Josué” that he “was sniffing eight figures ’fore they came to they senses,” or how he rolls up bodies in “Virgil Abloh throw rug[s]” on “Chopstick.” Roc Marciano has always self-mythologized on a cinematic scale, committing himself to the pimp-meets-made-man role with ruthless aplomb. Here, the character is more like a collection of signifiers, an urban legend constructed from stories passed to each new generation of hustlers.
On Marciology, his full-length from earlier this year, Marci searched for new wrinkles in his already perfected style, each verse flush with vivid vignettes. On Skeleton Key, he seems most fascinated with the mechanics of syllables, meticulously slotting them into the productions’ crevices. He inverts the syncopation of the piano sample during “Knock It Off,” creating a bouncing, circular rhythm as he raps, “The team agreed to keep the light green/Till I put blood on your clean tee and then cut your cheek to the white meat.” Verses orient around bursts of internal rhymes, like the tumbling cluster halfway through “Rauf”: “The product hue remind me of Donahue/Madonna too, right before the debacle, a bottle flew/Knocked out a supermodel tooth.” Though he’s not as adventurous with his flows as he was on Marciology, he giddily experiments with enjambment, exploring the rhythmic possibilities of every line.
If The Skeleton Key might initially come off as the scraps of the Elephant Man’s Bones sessions—opener “Mystery God” is a gorgeous head fake, a lush, David Axelrod-esque slice of psych-funk that hews closer to Elephant Man’s silken sonics than anything that follows—it has a needling quality its predecessor does not. These songs embed like splinters, nagging until they have your undivided attention. At only 26 minutes, the album zips by, but the world it creates is so rich and well-defined that it continuously calls you back, like a ghost with unfinished business. Marci and Al are restless masters, constantly digging into their own work to see what unknown gems can be excavated.
