Six tracks of rap music being pulled apart and reassembled wrong.

This thing is fucking crazy. Fatboi Sharif and ELUCID are two of the weirdest and best in the game at being weird like this. This EP is just proof of that, and best part is, it’s not up its own ass with the experimentation. It might not be ‘easy listening’, but it’s challenging enough to be visceral and exciting without being alienating.

It’s one track on all platforms, doesn’t matter where you go it’s one track. Except that it’s not, it’s actually six. This is the first of many provocations this EP will give you. The music is dense, it is heady, it’s as if Bomb Squad took acid in Gary Indiana.

The first track has no drums, just a sampled guitar loop that doesn’t match its own beat, while Fatboi Sharif’s rhymes deal with alienation, urban depression, substance abuse, and all manner of contemporary maladies. He often gets called horrorcore, but I think to call him that is a disservice. To my mind, horrorcore is often about externalized horror. Think of some of Tech N9ne’s work, making songs graphically describing torture or murder or how evil and sick and twisted he is. Fatboi Sharif’s approach is different. His songs aren’t even really scary in any traditional way. What they are is eerie. His horror is phenomenological. In other words, his writing is about the horror of existing in an America full of alienation, substance abuse, urban decay, racialized violence, paranoia, family deterioration, and spiritual abandonment. His writing takes you into that horror, into that paranoia, into that inner experience.

Take this quote from the first track Rage, “Ain’t been the same since I seen God rage, substance abuse made the face of my mom change.” The horror here is the absence of any safety in Sharif’s world. ELUCID’s production captures this sense brilliantly with the guitar sample; rhythmically, it feels like it’s about to throw up. You can almost imagine the fog of mental life that goes along with that line. But this is only the beginning.

The title track is where the beats and lyrics work together to make something that rap can barely contain as a genre. Invasion Body Camera is a song about deteriorating mental health, perfectly summed up by Beans’ line, “no heaven for heretics.” The beat, if you could call it that, is made up of samples of shouting with enough layers and reverb to sound like they’re coming from all the rooms around you and down the hall towards you. That’s it. The screaming is the beat. If that sounds unappealing, that’s the point. Don’t look away you need to hear this.

God is an eternal Concorde opens immediately after with a bluesy guitar and drum sample for the beat. The sample undergoes some manipulation from hi and lo pass filters throughout the song, until it eventually becomes just an acapella, where Sharif describes how he “shadow box my conscious.” It’s Sharif by himself, the epic music fades, and we’re left with a man detailing his own mental deterioration.

The rap-rock onslaught continues onto The Noise Version of Spankmaster, where it sounds like Fatboi Sharif is going on an absolute rampage. This might be the most approachable of all the songs on the EP, and in fact it almost reminds me of a Czarface beat with the four-on-the-floor drums and overdriven blues-rock guitar sample. The sample is almost like default ‘epic music’ but the attitude Sharif brings to the track transforms it into something much more sinister.

1977 Dracula’s Kiss has a dub sample as its base, but with almost none of the bass leftover. It’s as if Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey were the soundtrack to a conspiracy theory. Where dub traditionally uses bass to anchor itself in space, ELUCID strips away the bass, leaving behind the claustrophobic core. The lyrics only add to this, of course. As is the theme throughout this whole EP, the lyrics use little snippets of sentences to construct what is essentially a paranoid diary of urban life.

The last track, Spiderz, has one of the more accurate titles I’ve read in a long time. The noise-inspired death-industrial-style beat really does make me feel like my skin is crawling with spiders. This is ELUCID at the edge of power electronics. Fatboi Sharif here writes what seems like a love song. Of course, this isn’t an ordinary love song, this is a love song from inside the same damaged psychic landscape the EP has spent its runtime constructing. “Mental illness … fogs view.” The lyrics here are possibly the closest Fatboi Sharif gets to standard horrorcore, but everything about the delivery and the beat selection and the clipped literary sentences combine to make this something far outside those standard bounds.

So what’s the pull? What makes me say this is an instant classic? Invasion Body Camera continually pushes at the edge of not just rap, but every other genre it interpellates, until they break. ELUCID spends each track starting from some kind of recognizable genre and pushing it until it falls apart, just like Sharif does lyrically. This isn’t an EP that should work in any normal world, but if Fatboi Sharif’s lyrics are anything to go off of, this world is far from normal.