Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon starts As of Now by paraphrasing a meme. “OK, I’m posted at the function in the corner, and they don’t even know,” he raps, his helium-tinged voice scooting through a flute sample. He pauses slightly, aware that a well-placed space in a sentence can seismically shift its impact: “…what I’m ’bout to do/I ask my boo, ‘Can we keep it low?’” Once you catch the cleverness of his comedic timing (they definitely know what he’s about to do), you should run the track back and listen for the preceding adlib, pushed low in the mix like a mischievous secret: “Watch this.”

You can almost see the glint in his eye as he unspools the rest of his soliloquy, oscillating between bleak details of threadbare pillows on trap house floors and shoulder-brushing flexes of cross-country flights and celebrity green rooms. When the beat switches, replacing the paisley jazz loop with a pulverized breakbeat and keyboard, it’s like an abrupt shift in lighting, shadows covering places you didn’t know could go dark. Jah-Monte’s casual delivery doesn’t change, but it suddenly feels deadly serious. When the hook comes back around, he’s still posted in that corner, this time rubbing his hands together like a Birdman reaction gif. The song sets up the impish opposition at play throughout As of Now, where Jah-Monte tempers vignettes of heartbreak and hustling with an amiable, absurdist wit.

Jah-Monte’s been releasing music for just over a decade, but in the dozen or so releases since 2019’s Jewelry Rap, the Charlotte rapper has really hit his stride. His uniquely disarming sense of humor augments—and sometimes masks—the complexity of his taste and technical ability. In shakier hands, his output—like 2021’s Navy Blue-produced Beautifully Black or his 2023 collaboration with Sadhugold, The Black Messiah—might be lumped into the glut of solid, slightly stoned underground records that disappear as soon as the needle lifts. Instead, they’re immediately approachable but simultaneously layered and rewarding listens, full of subtle one-liners and detailed stories, incisive as they are droll.

As of Now is the height of Jah-Monte’s ability. A line like “Outside while you working remote” from “Instagram Highlights” establishes his bona fides and elicits a chuckle in a matter of seconds; when he casually drops, “I had run off on my plug, he was chasing me with a Glock” on “Butter Leather Weather,” it feels good-natured and funny despite what he’s describing. He stitches tracks together with interstitial moments that foreground the fun of the record, like interludes featuring the voice of a woman named Milly, who appears several times to declare it “the best album ever.” The skit that ends the album, “Lord Jah-Monte’s #1 Supporter,” is a compilation of voicemails presumably left by an obsessed hater, spinning up creative ways to call Jah-Monte a bitch. It’s bizarre and ridiculous, a bit of finishing salt to the record’s dueling vibes of “aw shucks” and “don’t fuck with me.”

Tellingly, Jah-Monte’s never self-deprecating. He checks himself now and then, like during the chorus of “So You Really Don’t Miss Me?,” when he implores, “If you love me, tell me you sorry that it got ugly,” to which singer Wild Recluse replies, “I ain’t sorry,” with a sultry croon. But his good-natured goofiness projects confidence; Jah-Monte knows—and loves—himself enough to recognize his flaws and weaknesses, laughing about fucking up checks on dates that go nowhere, yearning for permission to cheat on his girl, or realizing he’s taken too many shots at the rap show to be coherent. That self-awareness helps him sell otherwise corny lines like “If I was Adam Sandler, I’d press rewind,” or the grinning bossa nova breakup tale on “Let Me Reflect / Uber From O’Hare.”

You also hear that confidence in his across-the-map beat selection, which ranges from Donuts-esque sidechain workouts to diaphanous cloud rap to druggy Southern thump, often in the same song. And like the hairpin turns in the production all across the album, Jah-Monte approaches themes from different angles and pivots without breaking a sweat. On tracks like “Drunk Nights In Edgewood (IMYSM)” and “Nah, You’re Mad Extra,” he hits a pattern similar to Freddie Gibbs’ double-time trance-state fluidity, with syllables flaring at the ends of bars like a jazz drummer hitting an open hi-hat. His most mesmerizing display comes on the first half of “Flewed Out, All Expenses Is Paid For,” performing like a runner who didn’t hear the starting shot. Each word drags behind the beat, creating a buoyant counterrhythm to Laron’s choppy boom-bap, sitting comfortably in time but landing where you’d least expect. As of Now is a virtuosic showing, and at no point does it feel like Jah-Monte is stretching past his limits.

The subject matter might not be breaking any new ground here; at their core, these are songs about the lengths he goes to get laid and the shady things he’s done to get paid. But no matter how strange, or sad, or dark his stories get, Jah-Monte raps like you’re also in on the joke. Throughout As of Now, he extols the virtue of believing in yourself, but recognizes that getting there—and staying there—sometimes feels silly. In a crowded pool of young rappers who dissect their feelings, unsure of whether there’s any underlying meaning, Jah-Monte comes off as the true existentialist: If you can’t laugh at yourself, what’s the point?