Like his heroes Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, Fatboi Sharif builds maniacal worlds. It starts with the way he presents himself. Whether he’s shirtless, wielding a knife in clown makeup, or hopping off stage in a hospital gown, he performs like he just escaped from a haunted psych ward. His lyrics use shocking imagery, but hint at personal and societal truths. His theatrical background helped him craft a rap persona like Jack Nicholson in both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Shining. His background in poetry makes his bars something of a jigsaw: grotesque puzzles to either decipher or blow your brain to smithereens.

The surface level hip-hop analog is ODB. Sharif is aggressively bizarre. But he doesn’t need the dustiness of RZA’s kicks and snares. He just needs the dust: the sounds of the universe fragmented and broken down to their essence, then built back up into controlled chaos. This is what longtime collaborator and fellow Jerseyite Roper Williams does for him.

Most MCs rap over beats. Sharif’s bars sprout up from the soil that Roper Williams lays for him. If David Lynch directed Jack and the Beanstalk, Sharif would play both roles in the fairy tale. He’s Jack, a regular guy acutely aware of the darkness of society, making calculated moves to carry himself skyward. He’s also the Giant, an otherworldly figure bellowing couplets down from the clouds.