Curly Castro Turns Blaxploitation Into Autobiography on Yaphet
The ShrapKnel MC's first solo album in five years pairs comic-book bravado with grief, over a Locust production run that moves from breakbeats to the future.
Curly Castro has spent most of the last few years as one half of ShrapKnel, his duo with PremRock, whose 2024 album Nobody Planning to Leave came out on billy woods's Backwoodz Studioz. Yaphet, released September 18 on the same label, is his first solo album since 2021's Little Robert Hutton, and it is built on a premise that sounds like a gimmick until the second half of the record proves otherwise.
The concept
The title points at Yaphet Kotto, the actor from Across 110th Street and Homicide: Life on the Street, and the album uses 1970s Blaxploitation heroes and antiheroes as its frame. Castro told POW MAG's Paul Thompson that the original plan was to watch a Blaxploitation film, hear a Locust beat, and write a song, and that the method stalled after four films. He also said he once dismissed the genre as exploitative before coming back to it as a catalog of underground Black heroes. That reappraisal gives the record its tone: pulpy, loud, and not ironic about it.
The first stretch plays to that. "SuperDOPE" turns the Marvel roster into neighborhood gossip in a nasal, half-blunted voice that Bandcamp Daily's Phillip Mlynar heard as a nod to Cypress Hill, and Locust pushes the beat back toward the era of MF DOOM's Operation: Doomsday and KMD's Black Bastards, with supervillain vocal drops stitched in. The couplet that sets the scene:
"Cyclops, Wolverine and the Nightcrawler / Hit me late night one time for marijuana"
Locust's map
Every beat here belongs to Milwaukee producer Locust, with Castro credited as co-producer. Locust made three beats on Little Robert Hutton, more than anyone else on that record, and Castro says he kept him in reserve for exactly this kind of project. According to Castro, Locust sequenced the album to travel in time: old-school drums at the top, 1990s textures in the middle, something more futuristic by the end.
That sequencing is the album's best structural idea, and the opener sells it. "Black Don't Crack" runs almost six minutes and hands the mic to Fatboi Sharif, Blueprint, Brian Ennals, SKECH185, AJ Suede and billy woods. Under them, Locust reworks the drum break from Billy Squier's "The Big Beat" differently for each rapper, then returns it to its original form under woods's closing verse. Posse cuts usually flatten their guests; this one gives each a different floor to stand on.
The middle widens the palette. "Cheese N Bread Riddum" rides a reggae riddim that Castro says was all over 1990s dubplates, a nod to his West Indian roots. "The Delectable Negro," at 1:38, sets a story about cannibalism under colonial slavery over a Detroit basement-house pulse, per Martin Douglas at Bandcamp Daily. It is a jarring pairing on paper and the most unsettling minute and a half on the record.
Where it lands
Castro's label notes say the album covers the death of his infant daughter, the death of his father, and his own mortality, and the back half of the 13-track list is where the costume comes off. "I Couldn't Breathe, If I Wanted To…" is sparse and solemn, with Castro recounting a cancer diagnosis in the first person. The breathing sound running through it came from a poetry group's Lamaze-style exercise, which Castro ties to his own childhood asthma and to his daughter's death in the POW MAG interview.
The closer, "Last Good Will," is a list of bequests written as if after his death, and it is only 1:47. Douglas notes that the track skips partway through on purpose, leaving the list unfinished. It is a small production choice that does more than a third verse could have.
The verdict
Yaphet has its weight problems. Thirteen tracks carry twelve guests, with Margel the Sophant on three of them, and the front half can feel more like a roster than a solo record. The Blaxploitation frame also falls away sooner than the album's pitch suggests. But that drift is the shape of the thing. Castro builds the hero first, then shows what the hero was covering for. With Locust drawing a clear line from breakbeat to future underneath him, it is the fullest picture of Castro as a solo artist so far.