Damon Locks List of Demands

Damon Locks' New 2025 Studio Album List of Demands on LP.

List of Demands, Damon Locks’ first foray into creating an entire album from spoken and text-based work, finds the Chicago-based musician and educator collecting cultural abstractions and reorganizing them into a firm truth. The album lays out a vision of Black liberation and transmits it outward as a song cycle of bite-sized MF DOOM-meets-Nikki Giovanni rhythm experiments.

The sample-based constructions are steeped in a lifetime of not only keen cultural observation, but direct communal participation in the culture. Locks’ decades-long resume connects the dots between experimental improvisation, sample based hip hop, punk, and poetry – each done at the highest level and with a list of collaborators that could spin the head of even the most jaded listener. And that seems to be the point. To jump-start the entire personality spectrum into action. Ecstatic positivity examined via his nuanced grasp of reality, all working toward that ever-evasive concept of what could be.