It wasn’t that long ago that a casual reference to “LARPing” would instantly get you banished to the dorkiest table at the cafeteria. If only those kids could have known that one day, “side quest” would just as commonly describe a trip to score ketamine as an opportunity to bust out the 20-sided dice. Chris Taylor’s always managed to split the difference, juggling the sleek pop sensibilities of a club-hopper with the type of obsessive engineering that only comes from late nights spent burying your head in software. That contrast lives in his music as Body Meat: Blake-ian vocal hooks get chopped up against mutant MIDI rhythms partway between Nyege Nyege and Nobuo Uematsu, and no cartoonishly obtuse sound is too stiff to loosen up into an elastic excuse to dance.

Starchris, Body Meat’s long-awaited full-length debut, makes it seem as if all the various genres and sounds currently percolating through our world might’ve been secretly emanating from his all along. Rage beats tumble into hyperspeed rave-ups; post-SOPHIE sound design squiggles alongside mangled Afrobeats and teeth-gnashing nu-metal. It’s the kind of genre-splitting that’s become a hallmark of hyperpop, but Starchris never comes off like a gimmicky mashup. Instead, Taylor explores what these styles have in common: how competing bass patterns can interlock, the way a slight vocal tic can set up an impending drop, the exact moment when a track pushes the listener from a head nod into a full-body flux, and how to subdivide that sensation even further.

As plugged-in as all his fastidiously designed timbres might make him seem, Taylor’s approach is decidedly old-school in spirit. A DIY lifer who cut his teeth in Denver and Philly’s experimental scenes before finally ending up in New York, his music is more of a piece with the underground art-rock of decades past: the Zach Hills and Deerhoofs of this world whose acrobatic musicianship could only be outpaced by their need to deploy it for the silliest purposes imaginable. Throughout Starchris, Taylor decodes the anything-goes outlook of the modern internet addict and brings it hurtling into the real world. On “Crystalize,” after two woozy minutes of plastic psychedelia where Taylor’s buzzy tones seem to be going eight different directions at once, the most surprising moment of all comes when he locks into a straight-ahead 4/4 groove. Layering it with blown-out synths and a marimba arpeggio that would be at home in a Banjo-Kazooie boss fight, Taylor holds just enough reign over his discombobulating ideas to steer them through one thrilling detour after another.

The unifying principle of Taylor’s work is rhythm: stretching it out, tightening it up, and working it like a muscle. “People call them weird rhythms,” he told Pitchfork in 2019 about the response to his music, “but in other cultures these rhythms are normal. If you listen to Middle Eastern music, they think of rhythm in a completely different way. It’s not weird. They just got more groove.” Taylor, whose Ethiopian dad played congas with Earth, Wind & Fire, rarely leaves his beats in the same place he found them; “North Side” opens on a twinkling ballad of tongue clicks and Minecraft flickers as Taylor confesses that he “sold 15 of your swords” like they were plums in an icebox. Halfway through, the track erupts into a booming Afrobeat and Taylor’s croon shoots up and down at the same time, pitch-shifted to a chipmunk squeak on one end, dropped down an octave on the other. “I can feel it in my surrounding Wi-Fi,” he rumbles as the track crashes about in a polyrhythmic whirlpool. You can sense the simulation glitching.

Perhaps as a consequence of Taylor’s interest in designing video games, empty space and its governing laws are just as important to his songs as what fills it. Sparse, ringtone-like beeps set the stage for a trance-y tumble into cyber-pop on “Focus,” while the Earth-rumbling “High Beams” tees up a booming beat drawing from F1lthy’s rage rap framework, then cranks it further and further into the red. Even his calmer songs distort their environments in subtle ways: “Electrische” starts out as a buildup of skipping beats, until a footwork-y bass pattern comes in and the whole thing drops out. When Taylor brings the beat back, it comes swathed in slow, cloudy chords that cast the track into a Basic Channel-esqe ether. It’s as if he’s not trying to catch up with the beats anymore, but just floating between them.

Connecting all these scattershot sounds is Taylor’s own Auto-Tuned voice, which glides through his songs with R&B softness, waiting to be torn apart. Though occasionally he lets it hover sweetly, often he willfully mangles his clean tone into something uglier. Halfway through “The Mad Hatter,” Taylor questions his own state of mind, melismatically declaring, “I’m not ready to say it out loud,” before his voice gets whisked up into the sky like a runaway helium balloon. “Focus” ends with him speeding up his own vocal cuts until the sample sounds as if it’s hyperventilating. Taylor treats his own breathy grunts and sidewinding vocal runs with the same granular detail as the rest of his rubbery textures, slurring together glints of half-remembered moments from radio hits into a shimmering miasma.

Starchris can be disorienting, but it never feels like chaos is the point. Taylor’s most impressive feat might just be how naturally he melds all these bizarre fragments, taking concepts that could seem insular and building welcoming pathways toward them. He sounds more in control of his songs than ever, taking time to gradually lay their foundations, tease out their possibilities, and let the momentum swell. Toward the end of the climactic, eight-minute “Ōbu No Seirei (Spirit of an Orb),” Taylor cuts through a prismatic sound field of artificially plucked cellos and breathy flutes to lay down a heaving industrial groove. “I don’t want to live like this,” he sighs as the track descends into an uncanny, nightmarish throb. The rhythm unfurls, and Taylor’s voice begins to eerily loop: “I can’t move,” he aches over and over. He sings it as if there couldn’t be a worse fate.