Throughout his underground career, in hallucinatory beats and verses littered with viscera, the New Jersey rapper has made his home in life’s uneasy, hard-to-categorize spaces. His first record for billy woods’ Backwoodz Studioz is no exception; it breaks down everything in its path, from euphoria to personal and social trauma, and especially the walls of any container you try to keep it in. As Sharif himself puts it to me: “My music is a vehicle to both sides of what we go through as people, from the good and the bad, but also that in-between where we may get confused on which one is going on at the moment.”

Enter the discordant keys and distorted religious imagery of “Ash Wednesday,” or the light-headed synths and shouts of “The Farewell Outfit.” Decay grows in the hairline cracks that separate the gorgeous from the grotesque–the beats, as produced by Steel Tipped Dove, spread like patchworks of colorful fungus, perfectly natural, beautiful, and alien, while Sharif drops references to literature and film by the thousands, like so many airborne spores.