Playboi Carti has been playing hard-to-get for years. He’s been teasing a new album without releasing it. He’s been putting new tracks up on YouTube or Instagram but not the streaming services. He’s gone four years without a full-length statement. So when Carti announced that his long-awaited LP would finally arrive today, people got excited. Many of those people stayed up late. It was a long night for them.

At midnight last night, the new Playboi Carti album did not exist. Carti tweeted that it would arrive at midnight Pacific instead, so people kept waiting. That time rolled around and nothing happened. Hundreds of thousands of people were watching Kai Cenat’s stream, waiting for the record to arrive, so they all got to see Cenat’s dismayed face when Carti told him, over FaceTime, that the album would be out in two more hours. Two more hours later, it still wasn’t out. All those disappointed Playboi Carti fans, stressed out and bleary, woke up this morning to find that the Carti album was here after all. It arrived just as the sun rose on the East Coast, and it’s called Music, even though the cover still says I Am Music. Those fans all got the thrill of hitting play and hearing “Pop Out,” a song that sounds like someone Auto-Tuned the noise a fork makes when it’s stuck in a garbage disposal.

This is the Playboi Carti method at work. His music sounds best when your internal system is shorting out, whether from drugs, disorientation, lack of sleep, or some combination thereof. The disappointments and broken promises and blown deadlines are simply part of the experience. In some ways, Carti functions as a mainstream star, one who plays the game. He’s performed at the last two Grammys telecasts, and he’s guested on a ton of tracks from established stars — Kanye West, the Weeknd, Future, Travis Scott — and made those songs much bigger simply by being there. But Carti also operates in impulsive, fly-by-night ways, cultivating the kind of mystique that can only come when you consistently refuse to do the thing that so many people want you to do. Some of his aura comes from his unreliability. He’s big enough to book an arena tour but weird enough to push that tour back multiple times before canceling at the last minute. That’s who he is.

When Music finally came out this morning, the biggest news, beyond the mere existence of the album, was the presence of man-of-the-moment Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick appears on three songs from Music — rapping a fired-up guest verse on “Good Credit,” singing the hook on “Backd00r,” and adding fired-up ad-libs to “Mojo Jojo.” This raised some eyebrows. Kendrick hasn’t guested on another rapper’s track since last March, when he set the stage for his MVP year by summoning his inner demon on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That.” For Kendrick to appear on multiple tracks from another rapper’s album, when that rapper is not even related to him, suggests a rare level of esteem. In this case, it’s hard to reconcile that esteem with the saintly veneration that Kendrick still commands. From all available evidence, Playboi Carti is not a good guy.

Throughout his career, Playboi Carti has run afoul of the law multiple times. He’s been arrested for gun and drug possession, reckless driving, domestic battery. In 2022, he was charged with choking his girlfriend when she was pregnant. Kendrick Lamar has long associated with figures who have histories of terrible acts, like Dr. Dre and Kodak Black, so this isn’t out of character for him. My guess is that Kendrick Lamar is on Music for the same reason that I’m reviewing the album on Stereogum: The energy surrounding Playboi Carti right now is a powerful, mysterious force. If you don’t want to hear his music because of what he’s allegedly done, that’s a perfectly valid stance, maybe an admirable one. But you can’t ignore Carti and remain fully tapped in with the things that are currently happening in popular music.

Whether you like it or not, the release of this album is a real societal event. Carti’s popularity says certain things about the behavior that many younger people refuse to demand from their musical idols. It also says something about a younger generation’s acceptance for genuinely unconventional music. Playboi Carti doesn’t fit any traditional great-rapper criteria. He’s not a verbose technician. He doesn’t paint pictures with his words. Plenty of the time, you can’t even understand what he’s saying. Instead, Carti is all instinct, no technique. His electrified jabber is a whole new instrument, a vehicle for drug-dazed death-drive energy. Listening to Music, in its excessive 30-song overload, feels like running directly into a hurricane. It’s heedless and dangerous and self-destructive, but it might make you feel like you’re alive.

Superficially, Music looks like a standard-issue A-list event-rap album. Its sprawling length will probably juice up its streaming numbers. Its guests aren’t Carti’s 0pium affiliates or the underground weirdos who he’s influenced and inspired. Instead, almost all of them are the same rap A-listers who show up on every big album — Travis Scott, Future, the Weeknd, Lil Uzi Vert, Ty Dolla $ign, the newly free Young Thug. Music has big producers like Metro Boomin and Cardo and Wheezy, and it flits between sounds and moods almost randomly. Some of the samples must’ve been expensive to clear, like the great guitar riff from Ashanti’s “Only U,” which appears in chopped-up form on “Cocaine Nose.” There’s no formal innovation in the construction of Music, but it still finds ways to spin you around and flip you upside-down. That comes down entirely to Playboi Carti’s approach. He couldn’t be a normal rap star if he tried.

The entire rage-rap subgenre owes its existence to Playboi Carti, and it probably gets its name from Carti and Trippie Redd’s 2021 track “Miss The Rage.” But Carti’s stylistic descendants and direct proteges treat rage as a genre, coloring within its lines. They rap in skittery baby voices over blown-out 808s and static-drenched samples because they’ve figured out that that’s what they’re supposed to do. Carti never learned that sensibility. Instead, he seems to work entirely on impulse, switching flows and styles as the spirit moves him. You can’t make sense of it because Carti never bothered to make sense of it. The only moments where Music feels overthought are the parts where other people show up.

Travis Scott appears on three tracks from Music, and his appearances are instructive, if only because the album would be a whole lot better if Scott just disappeared. On paper, Scott and Carti are similar figures — fashion-plate enigmas who chase adrenalized catharsis, dressing like bats and whipping up anarchic moshpits at every opportunity. But Scott’s event-rap statements often feel like brand strategies at work, his prog samples and spaceship textures all tweaked just so. A Carti record, even a high-profile one like Music, feels like pure splatter — ideas and moods and tones all hitting unpredictably, nothing overstaying its welcome. Whenever Travis Scott shows up, the energy flags catastrophically. He can’t keep up. Nobody can. Even Kendrick Lamar feels out of place when he’s doing anything other than the “Mojo Jojo” ad-libs, where he sounds less like a collaborator and more like a fan.

I like listening to Music because I like the confusion. “Pop Out” is a hell of an opener, an abrasive electro-grind slathered with digital distortion that’s been carefully engineered to hurt your feelings. That goes straight into “Crush,” where a gothic gospel choir chants the phrase “shawty gon’ let me crush” over a bloopy keyboard that could’ve come from an ’80s Nintendo-game soundtrack. That feeds into the lo-fi operatic catharsis of “K Pop,” one of many album tracks that doesn’t quite reach the two-minute mark. On those three songs, Carti sounds like three different people — respectively, an angry toddler making explosion sound effects, a whisper-yelping pick-up artist, and a know-it-all cartoon fox who’s delighted to explain all the reasons that you’re not good enough to join his gang of cartoon foxes. Then an extended churning, dramatic intro suddenly gives way to one of the album’s few familiar moments — “Evil J0rdan,” an ominous hard-splat banger that’s been one of my favorites since Carti posted the lo-res video last year.

That sense of disconnect keeps coming back through the album. God only knows when Carti recorded all of this. Some of the songs have already been out as YouTube videos or live performances or partial leaks. Without feature credits listed, the superstar cameos all come up as surprises, sometimes misleading ones. (Lots of online sources immediately proclaimed that SZA sang backup on “Backd00r” and that Kanye West co-produced it, but Variety says that the track’s backup singer is Jhené Aiko and that West had nothing to do with it.) Some of the songs trigger flashbacks to past internet-rap eras via samples, with Carti’s producers flipping beats from SpaceGhostPurrp, Rich Kidz, the late Bankroll Fresh, and even Carti’s own 2017 breakout “Magnolia.”

The styles keep changing, but it almost always sounds like Playboi Carti. Carti’s regular producers F1LTHY and Ojivolta supply the lurching, off-kilter feel that they’ve always brought to his music. It sounds like operatic video-game music filtered through hallucinatory layers. Even when big-name producers like Metro Boomin or Cash Cobain contribute tracks, they alter their styles, adapting to the unstable thunder that Carti favors. But every once in a while, the storm breaks and something more approachable shines through. The Weeknd’s “Lie To Lose” chorus offers a sudden dose of pop clarity, with Carti suddenly switching out of hellion mode to mumble sweet nothings. That kicks off a three-song suite of tracks that might be considered love songs, with Carti doing gasping-romantic singsong on “Fine Shit” and threatening to get melodic on “Backd00r.”

Carti raps about plenty of random sex on Music, just as he always has. On those three tracks, though, he sounds lovestruck, which is a new thing for him. On “Fine Shit,” he speaks of a woman so beautiful that she can’t live a normal life: “My bitch so bad she can’t even go outside/ My bitch so bad she can’t even post online.” Even there, though, Carti is prone to distraction, interrupting himself to say, “In New York, I stepped in my Timbs/ I can’t feel my limbs/ I just canceled one of my shows to watch me a film.” (So that’s what happened with the tour. He wanted to watch a film.) Later on, Carti cedes the spotlight to Young Thug, his most obvious stylistic ancestor, to get gorgeously bubbly on “We Need All Da Vibes.” That might be the cleanest, least chaotic song on the album, and Carti is barely on it.

The most accessible moments on Music often sit next to the most abrasive ones, and the disconnect between them helps fuel the album. Music doesn’t lead you through peaks and valleys. It jerks you from one to the next haphazardly, keeping you from finding your balance. If you have specific hopes for Music, if you want it to do any one particular thing, then you will be disappointed. The best way to experience it is to give yourself over to the bedlam, to understand that the abrupt twists and turns are part of the ride. If you’re willing to embrace the chaos, Music is truly exhilarating. That’s why so many people were willing to stay up all night for an album that was never going to come out on time. If Music came out when it was supposed to come out, it wouldn’t hit the same.

Music is out now on AWGE/Interscope.