Atrocity Exhibition is released

Why it matters

Atrocity Exhibition came out September 27, 2016, on Warp Records. Danny Brown is a Detroit MC with a distinctive nasal high-register voice and a catalog of progressively more experimental records. Atrocity Exhibition is his fourth studio album and the one most critics agree is his most ambitious. The album is dense, harsh, deliberately abrasive, and produced largely by Paul White, an English electronic producer whose work pulls in industrial, krautrock, and free-jazz textures that almost no rap album of 2016 was attempting. The lyrics process Danny's substance use, his depression, and the structural difficulty of making art under those conditions. "When It Rain," "Ain't It Funny," "Really Doe" with Kendrick Lamar and Earl Sweatshirt and Ab-Soul, "Pneumonia." The album does not sound like anything else released by a major rap artist in 2016. It also does not sound like an attempt to be a hit record. You should hear it on headphones. The production rewards close listening in a way most commercial rap of the same year did not.