JPEGMAFIA And Denzel Curry Team Up For Grimey Music Video “JPEGULTRA!”

JPEGMAFIA and Denzel Curry is a match made in rap heaven. The two artists were elite on their first collab, “VENGEANCE I VENGEANCE,” but their latest song, “JPEGULTRA,” managed to top it. Both are in their absolute element, dropping clever bars over one of Peggy’s coolest productions. Unsurprisingly, the music video is just as good. JPEGMAFIA and Curry take to the streets with handheld cameras and deliver a visual that’s every bit as gritty and stylish as the song that accompanies it.

There’s some fun editing right off the bat. Denzel Curry raps the same bars in three different settings, and the clips are then overlapped in the frame so we can see them all simultaneously. It’s a jarring effect at first but it adds to the otherworldly aesthetic of the beat. The music video also plays with different film stock. There’s old VHS footage, grainy black-and-white stock, and footage obtained with a fish eye lens. They are interchanged about as frequently as JPEGMAFIA and Curry trade verses, which is to say: often. JPEGMAFIA’s last verse is electric. “On my knees for a God who can hear. I can’t pray to no God I can’t fear,” he spits. “I think I should have ran me a cult. Quarterback that ho like I’m Peyton on Colts.”

“JPEGULTRA!” samples “Get Up!” by the Japanese band Akira Ishikawa And His Count Buffalos. Peggy has spoken at length about the time he lived in Japan, and the impact Japanese music has on his own. He cited the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, in particular, during a 2018 interview with Vice. “It was one of the first ones I heard but all of them have been influential in their own way,” he explained. “The thing I took the most from them was the strange rhythms and just the weird things they do. So sometimes they’ll pull these crazy melodies out, they probably don’t even care. It’s a melody for a scene, but it makes me cry.”

JPEGMAFIA recently made headlines for throwing shots at Drake. He went at the Toronto rapper not once, but twice on the album I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU. Peggy has gone at Drake for most of his career, but the aggression of his bars caught a lot more attention this time around. He even addressed the controversy on social media. “If anybody got a problem with what i said on this album, my tour dates in bio,” he tweeted out. “Y’all cant even pay your rent but defending Drake for free, go outside and be somebody.”