Jeru The Damaja’s first two albums were entirely produced by DJ Premier of Gang Starr, and his debut has an almost paradigmatically early ’90s NYC energy. The beats are loud and crisp, engineered to pierce through street noise when booming from a passing car and paired with samples that provide a mere hint of melody, but nothing as decadent as a hook. With such minimal music, it’s on Jeru to hold the listener’s interest, and he does — his plainspoken style on tracks like “Ain’t The Devil Happy” is like someone lecturing you on a street corner from behind a card table weighed down with sticks of incense and essential oils, but the way he’ll split a multisyllabic word across bar lines gives his lectures on self-reliance (with occasional eruptions of patronizing misogyny, cf. “Da Bichez”) a Thelonious Monk-ish off-ness.