Detroit rapper, Danny Brown has aptly chosen to title his newest album after that Joy Division song. While Brown has always had lyrics worth reading into, he is mostly known in the rap community for excessive sex and drug use, his goofy voices, and his loud appearance, and thus that’s what his audience expects of him.

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Take a song like “Kush Coma” off Brown’s last record, Old. Casually listening to the track, you’d think it’s a song about getting turnt and smoking weed. It has an upbeat EDM beat and a feature from A$AP Rocky. However, read into the lyrics and you’ll find it’s really about self medicating to deal with depression. The seriousness of Brown’s words can sometimes be lost behind the veil of his often upbeat production and flow, as the seriousness of Curtis’ songwriting was not taken seriously enough by his audience. Curtis unfortunately took his life in 1980, don’t let Brown do the same.

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I’ve heard some call this record a return to form for Brown, going back to his XXX sound that garnered his acclaim. I’m not sure if I’d go that far, but if it is Brown returning to that XXX feel, he’s taken that record and taken it much further. XXX waited until its back half to get real with its subject matter, Atrocity Exhibition wastes no time. In fact, you could say it picks up where XXX left off. The album opens with “Downward Spiral,” a callback to a line from XXX, “It’s a downward spiral, got me suicidal.” This opener gets right into the psyche of Daniel Sewell. He raps over this beat of clanking percussion and falling guitars about his state of mind, “I’m sweating like I’m in a rave, been in this room for three days/Think I’m hearing voices/Paranoid and think I’m seeing ghosts, oh shit/Phone keeps ringing but I shut that shit off/Only time I use it when I tell the dealer drop it off.” He immediately addresses his excesses and his sleepless creative drive. We’re in for a ride on this record.  

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With the context of the album’s title in mind, it feels like while making this album, Brown probably at some point said something along the lines of, “They want a freak show, I’ll give them a freak show!” Atrocity Exhibition is an album that lives up to its title. The lyrics are morbidly entertaining, and the way Brown raps them seems inhuman. Meanwhile the production is equally as engaging because of its outlandish nature. Gone are the festival bangers from Old, and back in full form is Brown’s charisma, with the weirdness cranked to 11. The unapologetic approach to the graphic nature of this record may scare away more casual fans Brown picked up at the EDM festivals, but the real ones that stick around are in for a ride.

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“Ain’t It Funny” is a prime example of what I’m talking about. The song sound like a sinister circus with these cartoonishly ominous horns and heavy hitting kicks against Brown’s court jester/dark comedy style quick rapping about confronting drug abuse and the close calls that come with it. “Funny how it happens, who would ever imagine? That joke’s on you, but Satan the one laughing.” There’s also the track “Get Hi” which features B Real. It might be the weirdest song Danny Brown has ever done. It sounds like the most cracked out episode of Pee Wee’s Playhouse and might make you rethink how often you smoke weed.

 

The instrumentals on this record are truly just as memorable as the raps. The majority of production was handled by Paul White, with some tracks from Alchemist, Petite Noir (who also has a feature), Evian Christ, DJ Playa Haze, and longtime collaborator/fellow Detroiter Black Milk on “Really Doe” (more on that later). If you’re one of those people calling this album a return to XXX, this is where I can see what you mean. Brown said he used a lot of beats he had lying around as far back as the XXX sessions that he wasn’t ready to rap over at the time. Regardless of when the beats were made, the album still sounds ahead of its time, and has perhaps the most wide variety of sounds to date. I admire the use of live instruments on the Petite Noir track, “Rolling Stone” as well as the uptempo and ghettotech influenced “When It Rain” (shouts out DJ Assault and Green Velvet) which might be the hardest, most Detroit thing Brown has ever put out. No one sounds the same, each one a bigger Atrocity Exhibition than the last.

 

Obviously, Danny Brown is still the star of the show, proving that he’s the most unique rapper in the game. As per usual, Brown plays a lot with his vocal range. The more urgent and up-tempo songs feature his iconic higher pitched tone, while the slower songs with heavier, more direct subject matter exhibit the lower end of his voice. That’s what sets Danny Brown apart from most rappers, he uses his voice for more than just the vessel of his lyrics, but as another instrument in the song, something rappers like Young Thug are now trying to emulate.

 

Meanwhile, Brown’s lyrical game is as strong as it’s ever been, which is why it’s important to listen deeper than his voice, as what sounds like a silly track can be much darker and twisted than you originally thought. As a spitter, Brown rarely stops to take a breath, once he rides that beat he does not let go. And he never sacrifices lyricism for the sake of flow. He doesn’t have to when his lyricism is so in sync with his compromising flow. “Hanging with the Devil off of angel dust/For that money, in God we trust/all fall victim for greed and lust/who you supposed to trust when them guns go bust?” he raps over the unrelenting thumping beat on “When It Rain.”

 

As far as features are concerned, there’s slim pickings on this record. Most notable features come in the form of sung hooks from Petite Noir on “Rolling Stone” and Kelela on “From The Ground.” Schoolboy Q shows up to deliver some quick ad libs that really enhance “Pneumonia” and continue to make me wish Q and Brown would drop a duo project.

 

The one place Brown cashed out on the features is on the posse cut, “Really Doe” that everyone has been talking about. The stacked hip-hop heavyweight lineup features a bar fest from Brown, Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Earl Sweatshirt, with an excellent cypher-inducing beat by Black Milk that features knocking drums, with some fast bell arpeggios over it to really get the blood pumping. While every rapper certainly goes in with everything they’ve got as you’d expect, and Kendrick delivers one of the catchiest hooks of 2016 (really doe, like really doe), I have to hand it to Earl on this one. They gave the kid the last verse and he came in more aggressive than you’ve ever heard him when he proclaims “I wish a motherfucker would, Brown, I had to put my foot down.” Earl, known to be a quiet, in the dark type rapper, rapped like he was hungry and proved himself as one of the true heavy hitters in the spitter world that can not only spar with the best of them, but knock them out.

 

With each track entirely unique and fucked up in its own way, Brown manages to pull it all together on the closing track, “Hell For It.” Brown raps about how he got to where he is now, and how everything that happened to him as made him who he is. His struggled upbringing, drug dealing, drug abuse, and the sinister music industry, it’s all there. Danny has seen a lot of fucked up shit, but his work ethic is uncompromising. He refuses to go down without going down in history as one of the greats in hip-hop.

 

Atrocity Exhibition was well worth the wait. In the three years since Old, Danny Brown has crafted his most fully realized album to date. An album of this nature does not apologize for what it is, and doesn’t compromise its image for the sake of marketability, and that’s what makes it so real. It will frighten, disgust, and enlighten you, and it doesn’t care if you like it or not.