9 out of 10

It happened. Kanye West veered completely away from mainstream rap, and it’s amazing. West has always been an “alternative” rapper—he didn’t grow up in the “hood” and he has successfully broken rap conventions before, but Yeezus is a different animal.

Kanye West’s Yeezus sounds like the future. I mean that literally and figuratively—the album could define the next decade of popular music and it sounds like an over-electronic future that is muddled with memories from the past.

It’s important to know going in that this album might as well have no tracks. The whole album plays like a dance club soundtrack and it is interrupted in random places by beautiful raps over what sound like ‘60s soul samples.

Yeezus begins with a disorienting, deep synthesizer that is quickly cut by a techno drum beat in “On Sight.” Kanye’s voice that emerges, rapping “Yeezy season approaching/F**k whatever y’all been hearing/F**k what, f**k whatever y’all been wearing/The monster about to come alive again.”

It’s an appropriate opening line to an album that completely flipped all conceptions of rap upside down—and does it well.

At points it feels like Yeezus is a glitchy television that changes channels at random—some songs’ choruses are at a different tempo and use a totally different sample—but it works. By the third or fourth listen those snappy transitions in mood are part of what is great about this album. It challenges the idea of a song, and I am excited to see how West will market any of these songs as singles.  

A strong bass-line and tribal drums define “Black Skinhead” which is riddled with the topic of racism that defines a lot of the album. It isn’t unusual for Kanye but I still don’t know if I understand his rhetoric.

“They see a black man with a white woman at the top floor they gone come to kill King Kong,” West sang in “Black Skinhead,” which is a pretty absurd thing to say. If there is any critique I have with the album it is this kind of talk—West depicts America as a racist place that is uncomfortable with him being famous but he provides no actual proof for that claim.

If you weren’t aware, Kanye projected a video for “New Slaves” in Downtown Raleigh last week. That marketing campaign wasn’t unique to Raleigh (it was a publicity campaign in a few cities) but it was cool, especially since it’s one of the best songs on the album.

It begins almost as a spoken word song with West rapping in the chorus, “See there’s leaders and there’s followers/but I’d rather be a d**k than a swallower.” Much like the rest of the album, “New Slaves” sounds like house music with rap on top.

“New Slaves” is broken by what sounds like a muddled orchestral ballad with auto-tuned West and Frank Ocean singing. It is by far the most beautiful piece in the album and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me some serious goosebumps.

The break in “New Slaves” marks a transition into some ethereal, slower—but still vulgar—rap. The song is followed by a surprising collaboration between West, Chief Keef and Justin Vernon in, “Hold My Liquor” which is a balancing center to the album that leads into “Blood On the Leaves.”

“Blood On the Leaves” begins as another soft song but jettisons into a very serious rap song that is arguably the best track on Yeezus. West sings, “We could’ve ugh, we could’ve been somebody/Or was it all our first party/When we tried our first molly/And came out of our body.”

It’s worth mentioning the only drug mentioned in the album is appropriately ecstasy. Yeezus sounds like how I imagine ecstasy would feel—energetic to the point of darkness, disorienting and bright without any lasting satisfaction. For what it’s worth, it’s gorgeous.

The album, topped off with, “Bound 2” has a classic, soulful feel to it, with Charlie Wilson singing, “I know you’re tired of loving, of loving/with nobody to love, nobody, nobody. 

Yeezus is as dark as it is enchanting, and in that way it is beautiful. It challenges the idea that popular music must be conventional, and completely challenges the idea of hip-hop in general. West has created another amazing piece of art, and lives up to the aptly titled album.