The thing about road trips is that I remember a lot more about the aux cord arguments and hot take debates along the way than I do snapping photos of the Grand Canyon. Admittedly, my biggest flaw as a rap fan is not taking that lesson to heart: I’m so caught up in what’s next that I forget that getting there is the best part. One rapper I wish I’d paid closer attention to is Raz Fresco, who got his start as a Brampton teenager in the early 2010s with a laid-back swag that resembled Wiz Khalifa if he were in the A$AP Mob. Eventually, he fell into the orbit of Atlanta’s DJ Holiday, and then Philly’s Don Cannon, releasing a string of solid, versatile mixtapes full of streetwise smoker’s anthems.

Somewhere in the middle of the decade, Raz Fresco fell off my radar. In that time he got deeper into his studies of the Five-Percent Nation, went to jail, had a near-death experience, and kept tinkering with his music. I wasn’t drawn back in until the pandemic, in the midst of his mixtape series Magneto Was Right, titled after an X-Men comic book fan theory that holds that the antihero Magneto’s idea for a violent revolution to free the mutants was more rational than Professor X’s philosophy of peace. In a little more than a year, Raz Fresco put out nine of these tapes, finding a real groove in the process. It wasn’t radically different from the music he’d released as a teenager, but it was headier and loaded with the life experience to go with beats that brought to mind late-’90s Queens. (I’d now place his music somewhere between the hard-nosed nostalgia of Griselda and the new age flyness of Mutant Academy.) He’s been prolific ever since, leading up to The Eternal Now, a satisfying joint project with reliable production OG DJ Muggs.

Over 15 slow-mo tracks, Raz Fresco uses his buttery flow to weave together hard-earned life lessons, five-percenter lingo, comic book references, and a sense of disillusionment with the commercialization of hip-hop. On “Smoke & Mirrors,” backdropped by Muggs at his dreamiest, Raz name-drops the creator of Spawn, calls someone a “pussy” and “a slave to the charts,” and reflects on his artistic morals: “You can’t get your soul back or reverse the hour hand/This is how it lasts.” Less thoughtful writing sometimes undercuts his message, veering into cliché with the repetition of “Who own the dollar own the country” on “Bloody Money” or repeating tired hip-hop talking points on “Fake Beef”: “Used to paint the walls, now it’s they fingernails.” Save those out-of-touch gripes for the old heads with a YouTube channel.

But I enjoy the way Raz’s raps sometimes feel like a period piece: If it weren’t for a couple of technological and pop culture references here and there, you would think he was living in 1995, not born in 1995. In an era when so many rappers under 30 sound like they all grew up on the same movies and television, he’s going on about Carl Sagan and Rocky IV, which isn’t digging that deep, but hey, at least it’s one less rapper talking about Paid in Full and Steph Curry. There’s a lot of twisty wordplay even if he never blows me away; his skill as a rapper is that he’s really easy to listen to no matter how ruminative he gets. On the horn-blaring “World Peace,” he threads together social critiques (political corruption, neighborhood violence) in a verbose way, but his flow is so smooth that you wouldn’t mind throwing on the track during a candlelight dinner.

As far as DJ Muggs’ beatmaking renaissance goes, nothing here will end up in his highlight reel. The last time a Muggs beat really caught me off guard was when he channeled Coke Wave on Jay Worthy’s “In New York.” His work on this album is by the books. No shame in that, because even basic Muggs is pretty sweet. The grimier, blunt-force instrumentals like “Blow the Spot Up” or “Fifty Bop” are on the duller side, while the standouts are so jazzy and breezy that they could soundtrack Gene Hackman cruising around New York in The French Connection (check out “Spooky”). But at this point, a joint project with Muggs is a right of passage: a victory lap for those who, like Raz Fresco, have survived the grind of the underground rap circuit and arrived at some sort of destination.