Emerging from the gritty steel shadows of New Castle, PA, Ant Kelly delivers The Black Book, a debut LP that doesn’t just announce his arrival—it demands your full attention. Released under the fiercely independent Consigliere Records banner, the album is a fever dream of boom bap grit, lo-fi psychedelia, and real-life street theology, all steeped in authenticity and sharpened by experience.
Produced and mastered entirely by DJ Krooked and mixed by Kelly himself, The Black Book walks a tightrope between the cinematic and the chaotic. The beats are dusty, experimental, and hypnotic—layered with warped textures that lean into the surreal without ever losing their punch. Every track feels like a torn page from Kelly’s diary, scribbled in code but spoken in raw truth.
The LP also features Consigliere Records affiliates DB, Oddity Odyssey, PapDirty, and Riverside Jynn, each bringing their own weight to the sonic palette. The chemistry is seamless, the verses are sharpened, and the energy is unapologetically underground. Interludes from avant-garde Chicago artist FACES and SZO add a strange, almost prophetic quality to the transitions—part hallucination, part gospel.
What makes The Black Book stand apart isn’t just its sound design or lyrical content—it’s the mood. This is late-night music for thinkers and misfits, a self-contained world that rejects polished streaming bait in favor of something more timeless and haunted. Ant Kelly is a rare breed: a rapper who engineers, writes, and curates his entire universe from the ground up. In an era of shortcuts, The Black Book is slow-cooked and soul-carved.
Now streaming on Bandcamp and Spotify, The Black Book is not just an album—it’s a document of survival, creation, and underground resistance. Keep your ears tuned and your eyes peeled. The revolution might not be televised, but it’s definitely in the headphones.
