The Tonight Show doesn't always, or even routinely, welcome truly exciting musical guests. So when someone rolls through Studio 6B with the level of contagious energy Denzel Curry was putting out Monday night, you'd be doing everyone a disservice by not publicly celebrating it.
Indeed, Denzel Curry—making his TV debut, as host Jimmy Fallon points out in the intro—hit the NBC late-nighter for a medley of ZUU cuts "Ricky" and "Wish." Watch the performance above, below, or wherever else you prefer to watch things that are good great.
With ZUU, all of which is worth close studying, Curry entered the studio with a mind open to the possibilities of in-the-booth happenstance. Speaking with HotNewHipHop for a release day interview, Curry described the process as more intuition-informed than his previous work.
"Oh, I freestyled the whole thing," he said back in May. "Went from mind to mic. The pen and the pad is the middle-man if you already know what you're going to say." From there, Curry said the new material was briefly considered a mixtape, then a project, and—finally—an album.
Curry worked extensively on ZUU with Australian production team FNZ, who took a deep-dive into their side of the creative process in an interview with Complex last month. Revisit that here while spinning the album.
