Underground rap heads either love LAZER DIM 700’s serrated freestyles or say he epitomizes the genre’s deterioration into clickbait meme music. The Atlantan was the most abrasive rookie of 2024, toting a style midway between zoinked party music and air-raid sirens. He spits in an extremes-of-consciousness flow, cracking songs open with a torrent of expletives before launching into verses that are basically just one long, leapfrogging hook, like he’s trying to speedrun to the two-minute mark. It’s a world of za, zot, fawks, fine shyts, wigging and wigan out, buckshots, buck-downs, and bust-downs. He records everything on the phone app BandLab, so the mixing is nonexistent.

But underneath the viral spectacle is just a young man from the small town of Cordele, Georgia, who idolized Lil Wayne as a kid and got into making rap in the second grade, when his mother’s boyfriend would set up makeshift studios in their house. LAZER DIM 700’s entire come-up has been serendipitous: He met his early producer-partner Goxan in the comment section of a YouTube type beat; he created his first viral hit, “Asian rock,” on PlaqueBoyMax’s Twitch stream Song Wars, over a random beat he found on YouTube. His best songs catch lightning in a vial, 90-second snippets of comedy and chaos rooted in ephemeral, absurdist moments. They electrify but also make you wonder how different they might sound if he’d recorded them at another time, with other arbitrary thoughts swirling in his scrambled brain.

KEEPIN IT CLOUDY could soundtrack a haunted hayride where a distorted dark-plugg 808 effect shadows every scare, the actors are costumed like “Swiss cheese” opps, and weed smoke casts an impenetrable pall. This is LAZER’s debut studio album, which would suggest a level up: more time spent, higher production values. But instead of thrashing out to new ground, the album mostly sounds like LAZER on cruise control—and it loses some of the janky insanity that made his early music so thrilling.

You can blame some of that dulled spark on the cleaner mixing, which takes away the earlier music’s scrappy, sickly thrill, when the songs felt perpetually on the verge of collapse. But it’s also because LAZER’s voice has a sedate, weathered edge, like he recorded the album after running a mile personal best. To quote “KEEPIN IT CLOUDY,” he often sounds like the za has sent him into orbit. Goxan and Skello’s bass spasms like it’s speaking in vibrational braille on “MILITANT,” practically swallowing up LAZER’s arrhythmic flow. “FAST & FURIOUS” smacks like any number of dark plugg tunes from the last couple of years; LAZER soft-talks like he’s trying to calm Ark and mahxlxtl’s beat down from a temper tantrum.

Every now and then, he surges to action. The uneasy piano blare of “0436” brims with trademark LAZER deadpan: He threatens to step on someone and put money over their head, before exclaiming that a woman peed in his bed. He really comes alive on “WTM,” which pops with a spree of fawks and classic LAZER indignance (“The Uber takin’ long as hell, I walked back”). His flow syncs up perfectly with the twitching jerk beat, and it’s crammed with quotables—about trashing his Ricks, failed threesomes, a weed strain called “Joe Biden.” He talks about women in such a cold yet goofy way—“I got fine shyts all across the map, every time zone”—it sounds like he’s bragging about taking elegant dumps all over the globe.

While doubters say he’s got one of the most grating styles in modern rap, LAZER’s unemotive tone actually captures modern ennui. The way he flips on a dime from menacing threats to dippy hi-jinks with the same cool grin would be eerie if he didn’t paint grisly incidents like they’re scenes in a Dr. Seuss book. The effect is surreal black comedy. He’s “happy with blick like a kid with candy” on “On Gang.” He makes pareidolia art out of murder: “Strawberry red drip, niggas be shortcake/‘Hurry up and eat up your opps,’ what the fork say.” Rather than simply scare a man, he makes a man so terrified he “shits in his Pampers.” His best lines pierce the desensitized surface and mile-a-minute blitz; they reveal him as a guy unafraid to share his rawest feelings, a sly humorist who cracks jokes about how his roof will collapse because of how blown-out his music is. His hopes and anxieties are embedded deep in the snarled brain traffic.

But the fun soon dissipates, and by the back half, it’s all diminishing returns: The beats are spooky and spaced out but samey; LAZER hops between rhyme schemes with subdued disses and flexes. “REWIND” revolves around what sound like stock “alien gurgling.mp3” synths and a beat that LAZER lethargically floats inside of—a very unemphatic ending to the tape. For a man who’s used an arsenal of wacko instrumentals—KRXXK’s cosmic hellscapes, glitchy digicore, Minecraft mob effects, SpongeBob laughter—these feel sterile. He’s spoken about how he loves screwy, even downright bad beats, comparing them to “little fucked-up tattoos,” of which he has many. Here, they’re not bad so much as dreary and done to death, like amorphously evil textures Thouxanbanfauni would’ve rapped over in 2017. At his freaky peak, LAZER filters anxieties and grievances through his strange mind and microwaves the results in beats at the outer reaches of listenability. It’s a shame KEEPIN IT CLOUDY feels so regular.