There were times when more hip-hop albums sounded like this, like Ces Cru’s Constant Energy Struggles, the Kansas City duo’s debut full-length album on Strange Records. There were times when albums were formulated around concepts big and small, dedicated to pushing envelopes, sharing pin-pointed messages and built around lyrical conceits that required intense listening, confident rhyme flows that created new patterns, music that thumped and bumped and pounded and grooved. Those times are not now, but Constant Energy Struggles arrives in this moment—sounding not like an anachronism or a revival, but a celebration of a lineage that, while overshadowed by other aspects of hip-hop, has continued to evolve and progress outside of the mainstream.