A collaboration between rapper woods and producer Preservation, this is a dark and immersive album that presents hip-hop as cryptic diary-keeping. Woods and his guests — ELUCID, Mike Ladd, El-P, Quelle Chris, and more — present dystopic but anchored visions of urban poverty and spiritual desolation, tying it to the nihilism of low-level crime and all the way back to the Middle Passage and the pillaging of Africa by Western colonial powers (“Ashanti’s gold on Queen Elizabeth’s neck”). Every verse carries at least one image so vivid it’ll lodge in your brain like shrapnel; meanwhile, the music mixes avant-jazz, reggae, thumping beats, turntable scratches, sampled dialogue and quotes from movies about African dictators into a fever dream of half-lost cultural memory and present-day despair curdling into rage.

This is the realization of a dark dry dream born somewhere inside the old Fat Beats store on a hungover Sunday. That idea was to find something that tapped into the speckled spray paint panic of Cannibal Ox (friends of Woods’s) while keeping the emotional heft of songwriting and and the aleatory whiplash of live improv. Woods with producer Preservation made it with a vivid bag of ammonia raps, adding original cast appearances and making it work where a hundred albums like it have not.