This guy knows he shouldn’t say the word “pussy.” The protagonist of Geordie Greep’s “Holy, Holy” has just spent two minutes yapping at a woman about his sexual reputation—how well known he is among the Japanese and French Guyanese, how he’s like a god to the “jihadis” and “revolutionaries”—when he stumbles into a wildly distasteful pickup line. “I’ll bet your pussy is holy, too,” he says, chomping down on the word like it’s a cocktail straw between rear molars. He doesn’t want to say it, you can tell, but he can’t help himself, torn as he is between good manners and a crippling horniness that can only come from being profoundly lonely.

That strained “pussy” is the linchpin of The New Sound, the former black midi frontman’s debut solo record. This is an album full of dudes who are beset by a misery they can’t communicate, one that forces them into saying and doing things they know they probably shouldn’t. Across its 62 minutes, men in bars and nightclubs and boardrooms seem almost as if they’re competing to see who can abase themselves the furthest. These men aren’t gigachads or alphas on the hunt, though most of them aspire to both. They are, to a man, ridiculous. “I would’ve disemboweled myself just to hold your hand,” one declares, while another, inflamed by a sex worker with college aspirations, insists that he’s curious “to see what you think of Proust.” They are failures on their own terms—seldom do they seem to successfully bed a woman, even when they’re attempting to pay for sex—which makes their failures of ethics and good taste even starker.

Depending on your appreciation of over-the-top genre workouts à la Frank Zappa and Mr. Bungle, it’s either a deft artistic gambit or just delicious irony that these unsubtle, easily hateable characters are the focal point of unsubtle music that often risks being incredibly annoying. As a satirist, Greep shares an absurdist humanism and love of classic songwriting with Randy Newman (though it’s difficult to picture the latter singing a line like “You can cum more than 100 stallions”), but he lets both play out as minor elements within a turbulent, mile-a-minute style. Across The New Sound, his characters chatter their way through a pub mix of choppy salsa, mid-century showtunes, smooth jazz, Isley Brothers guitar disco, big-budget samba, and a dozen other styles you could imagine the characters in a Steely Dan song listening to (including the music of Steely Dan).

It’s a minor miracle of control that, even when it’s sprinting through stylistic hairpin turns, The New Sound never oversteers into pastiche, nor does it follow the same change-for-change’s-sake logic that made black midi technically impressive but emotionally distant. The music tends to move in natural, if often incredibly unlikely, directions, and Greep’s love for this stuff is obvious. The New Sound is often zany, chummy, and charmingly overeager to connect; you can feel the songs’ clammy hands pumping yours as they introduce themselves. But like a stockbroker returning from a bump in the bathroom, they rattle on at a pace that can snuff out fascinating creative sparks before they have a chance to fully catch. That restlessness, coupled with an exhausting parade of lecherous losers, makes The New Sound great in small doses but a lot to swallow over the course of an hour.

Nevertheless, Greep himself makes for consistently good company. Where most satirists might drop a single telling detail that gives their character away, he overloads these songs with phrases, images, and quips that seem to match the overblown personalities of the characters themselves; they’re photorealistic portraits drawn in hyperbole. The narrator of “Through a War” bombards the woman he’s singing to with questions, each one an attempt to neg her for her lack of experience and puff up his own bona fides: “Have you ever seen a man beg for his life?” “Have you tasted human flesh?” “Have you seen a woman give birth to a goat?” His desperation is overwhelming, and it shifts into tragicomedy when he thanks her for giving him “an incurable disease” (“for which I’m so glad, you’ll always be with me,” he quickly adds).

Like any good storyteller, Greep complicates his characters by giving us a peek of their motivating sadness. “I want you to put your hand on my knee,” the narrator of “Holy, Holy” finally tells the sex worker he’s spent the past five minutes badgering. “Will that be alright?” This kind of thing always risks the criticism that it’s normalizing the repugnant, as if pointing out that people do terrible things because of their own brokenness is somehow excusing the behavior itself. Greep never lets his characters off the hook—the best a Greep guy can hope for is to look incredibly pathetic—but to his immense credit, he never lets the audience off the hook, either. Throughout The New Sound he forces confrontations with all kinds of crass behavior—like the executive who takes a lunchtime sex break and can “still smell her snatch” while flipping through paperwork after—which in turn rounds these characters out even further. To shy away from such visceral details in the name of good taste would be to risk flattening their vulgarity.

Besides, the dictates of good taste are obviously not of much interest to Geordie Greep. He doesn’t so much embrace slickness as grease his songwriting with it, keeping the full-throttle engines he built with black midi intact and firing. These songs might have all the aesthetic trappings of, say, Milton Nascimento’s sophisticated samba, but they never quite feel at ease with that fact. You can hear it in the title track, an antsy revue that comes in the wake of “Holy, Holy” and mimics both the “Woody Woodpecker” melody and the riff from Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain” while also calling to mind crisp ECM guitar records like John Abercrombie’s 39 Steps or Pat Metheny’s New Chautauqua. These are sounds worthy of attention, but they each require breathing room to work properly. Given the relentless thrust of these songs, the stylistic departures often remain adjacent to one another rather than melding into something new.

The imperative to keep pushing forward is especially frustrating in “Bongo Season,” which Greep and his band have been stretching to nearly 20 minutes live but is the only song on The New Sound not to break the three-minute mark. It opens with a twilit conversation between spiritual jazz keyboards, bongos, and twinned salsa-boogie guitar solos from Greep and Daniel Rogerson. The airiness of the interplay, and the patience with which it develops, lightly recall Alice Coltrane and Carlos Santana’s Illuminations, and they offer fascinating possibilities for Greep and his band. Instead, the musicians chase the verse melody in a gorgeous low-key jam, then quickly usher the song out, shutting it down before it can develop.

Maneuvers like those mean that The New Sound is never really pretty, even though it often seems like it should be. It’s too frantic, too kinetic, and has too many places to be, which over the course of the album makes the essential beauty of Greep’s singing and the featherlight precision of his band feel like a front they’re tiring of holding up. It’s fitting, even artistically admirable, that such strain makes The New Sound’s music an appropriate wingman for characters who struggle to maintain basic human kindness. But it sure makes for an uncomfortable conversation.