Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this Ka album, The Thief Next to Jesus.

This is the latest and presumably last album we will hear from New York rapper, Brownsville legend Ka. If your finger has been on the underground hip hop pulse for the past decade or so, hopefully you've already heard of him. However, hearing of him and actually hearing him are two explicitly different things. Because this man's sound is not something that jumps out at you, that stops you in your tracks, per se.

He was certainly never one to desperately scream for anyone's attention. Rather, Ka's sound is something that you've got to be scanning for in order to find it. He is the quiet, staticky radio signal that you hear as you're carefully combing through the AM band. He is the shadowy figure that beckons to you with a quiet c'mere in the midst of a crowd of psychos on soapboxes.

Now, the earliest ripples of Ka's music career can be heard way back in the '90s and 2000s, but he actually wouldn't start gaining momentum until the 2010s, when his uniquely calm and skeletal sound stood out in the chaos of poppy, loud viral rap sensations.

For example, listen to early classics in Ka's 2010s run, like The Night's Gambit. Truly one of the few rap albums I can name that when I listen to it, it feels like time stops. It could be Ka's voice, it could be his poetic bars, it could be his favoritism toward drumless beats, or maybe a combination of the three. Either way, Ka had a truly idiosyncratic sound, one that I have a hard time comparing even to other similarly understated spitters like Roc Marciano. For sure, you can love both of them. It's just that Ka has always just scratched a different itch for me and has done so with impeccable consistency, with killer highs across his catalog, like on Honor Killed the Samurai, as well as Orpheus vs. the Sirens, which was a collab album he did with producer Animoss under the Hermit and the Recluse name.

But even the deeper cuts in Ka's catalog are worth listening to as well. Sure, while maybe you could argue that he stuck to his guns maybe just a bit too much for just about 10 albums, still, he was provably and especially great when it came to this very specific and minimal shade of hip hop, which has been extremely influential to some of your favorite underground superstars such as Westside Gunn or Billy Woods, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera – all of whom came out to tribute Ka when we were hit with the tragic news of his death this month.

October 2024 is when it was announced that Ka had passed away at the age of 52, and not much has been made public of his death, which is fitting because the man lived a pretty private life as well. Not much is known about him other than what he has told us in his music, some of the pinnacles of his career, who his closest relatives are, and he was also a long-time firefighter in New York City. It's just crazy to think that anybody could excel at that double life. Gritty pioneering street poet, but also fire captain. This all just speaks to the fact that he was really one of one.

Now, sadly, I wasn't quick to hop on this latest record here from Ka. Over the course of his career, he grew increasingly slow to throw his works up on streaming platforms, preferring to drop his projects in a more exclusive fashion out of the gate in order to fully benefit from the support of his most hardcore fans. So it took him a minute to spread this project around more widely.

So it took me a minute to get around to it with the compounding release schedules. With past releases, I have never been hesitant to sing Ka's praises when I need to, but I really do regret not being able to give him his flowers on this record while he was still around, because I really do think The Thief Next to Jesus is one of his best releases ever, and I'm sure on some level he knew it, too.

Now, this LP may be on the shorter side at 35 minutes or so, but it's somehow still a perfect distillation of everything that made Ka great, significant, and special as a rapper, as you're not just getting on this project his trademark vocal delivery and flow, which both sound as good as ever. But this record, in a way, is also an ingenious exploration into spirituality and Christianity, and specifically how it ties into Ka's personal life, his personal struggle, as well as black history and the African diaspora at large.

The music and production on this record also bring all that full circle as well, of course, because typically when Ka devotes himself to a concept, he dives deep, which is why most, if not all, of the beats on this record pull from various gospel recordings and performances, which are chopped up and presented in a way that makes them meditative and mesmerizing. Not to mention all the vocal snippets that either kick off or end these tracks that bring greater context to the record's core themes.

So yeah, there is a lot of messaging and a lot of intent going into this album, but it's Ka's veteran level of execution that really brings it all together. The woozy and warm organ and guitar loops on the opening track, "Bread, Wine, Body, Blood", are proof of his great ear for beats, knowing what beats will and won't fit his style. But lyrically, this is also one of the smartest and most well-reasoned critiques of modern-day hip hop that I've heard from an artist of Ka's generation, musically. He does a great job of pulling apart shallow dummy rap without necessarily putting the responsibility of that onto any one artist or group of listeners. Really, he's more critical of the system that incentivizes it and the context that it's born out of. Citing the music's lack of mental and spiritual nourishment, as well as a lack of a rebellious spirit. And further into the track, he dives into a hip hop that mostly exists to sell sex, which he takes to task as another form of industry exploitation.

And he makes clear to listeners that he doesn't necessarily take issue with any form of free sexual expression. As he says, "Don't get it twisted / I like a pretty miss with a vast gyatt".

My guy said gyatt on his last record. In 2024.

The strong start on this album, though, continues on to the next track, "Beautiful", which is an interesting writing exercise of sorts. We have this persistent gospel loop on the instrumental that gives us these big, beautiful chorus harmonies of the word beautiful. Then Ka, line for line, is writing numerous bars into that. It ends with the word beautiful, which conceptually is nothing unheard of in hip hop employing samples in that way. But I do think the sample chops on this track are quite masterful, and I like how long K is able to go with this writing concept. Not to mention how frankly eerie it is on this track to now hear refrains like, "May you live a nice long life / Hope it's beautiful."

This is not the only moment on this album that hits like this. There are pockets of "Tested Testimony" that read like deep reflections on Ka's mortality and age, and on the track "Borrowed Time", we have another chorus where Ka says, "I hope it's borrowed time when my time come."

On this track, I also love the cinematic and disjointed organ samples and the poetic flexes that Ka pens about the life he leads and the hurdles he's needed to clear to get to this point. "With grace / Face the firing squad / It's all canon / If only fit where the rich sit / I'd be in poor standing."

Now, deeper into the record, somehow Ka out-Ka's himself with some of the best lyrical gems of his career, like with, "In these dirty seeds / can't see who's supposed to be here, guarding us." Guarding us, protecting us, but also the way he phrases it or enunciates it, it sounds like, Gardening us. So yes, you're getting more bars and bits of wordplay, but also he continues to bring this subtle but authoritative commanding energy to some of the strangest and most minimal instrumentals you've ever heard.

There are tracks on this thing where it feels like he's spitting over ambient sound collages from Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica, like on "Collection Plate" or "God Undefeated". And even deeper into the album, we hear tracks that for hip hop, I feel like, make for some of the most creative uses of gospel samples ever, like the unbearably tense looping guitar builds on "Cross You Bear" or on "Fragile Faith", where you hear bits of bass, drum, vocal, and guitars, too, which all feel like they're operating at separate tempos, and yet it's also together.

Of course, I also think it certainly helps that Ka's flow is always so consistent and steady in the way that it is. It does bring some level of order to the chaos in a way. Then with the vocal shots and bare piano melodies, as well as droning bass on "Lord Have Mercy", this really leaves this track feeling like an abstract hip hop prayer.

It's also important to note in the second half of the record, this is really where Ka lyrically and thematically begins to take Christianity's role in the black community to task in a way, which is something that is obviously not for me, ME, to comment on. Still, it's clear on this record through Ka's lyrics and messaging that he wants us to know that years of witnessing and experiencing trauma as well as injustice has left his faith shaken deeply. He also repeatedly frames religion on this record as a means of black subjugation and white supremacy, with Jesus's message being completely bastardized and twisted. Something stated pretty openly on bars such as, "Oppressed, the press only address how Blacks respond / Here, the deceivers can't believe in their Jesus / That's a blonde."

Even in the final moments of the record, like on the track "Him and I", Ka seems to have more faith in well-armed, well-intentioned, politically militant black men to protect the community that they're a part of than any spiritual being.

Then the closing track on the record, "True Holy Water", features some gorgeous vocal chops juxtaposed against blood curdling screams for a powerfully dark instrumental finish, which almost overshadows and drowns out Ka's bars throughout a lot of the track, which I think encapsulates what Ka is going for, messaging-wise, on this record – that religion, that spirituality, specifically in an American context with respect to Black history, has been used not just as a refuge, but also as a cudgel, which makes for a very bold ending to this album and a very bold ending to Ka's career as well. An ending that, frankly, again, I feel like puts on display his true power as an artist. That power didn't simply lie in his ability to rap or put words together. No, it was more of an ability to remove the veil from your eyes and see the for what it is, or at least see it how he saw it as a very dark and unsettling and unforgiving place.

But yes, just incredible and highly impressive album from one of the best and most consistent to ever do it, which is why I'm feeling a strong 8 to a light 9 on this album.

Rest in peace, Ka Forever.