Last summer, there was no escaping “Welcome to the Party,” Pop Smoke’s breakout single. It was a terrific kind of claustrophobia. The beat is tense and ornery, and Pop Smoke, with a voice as soothing as industrial machinery, was a lordly narrator of impending mayhem. Rattling car windows, the song was a reminder of how New York hip-hop once sounded, and dominated. Booming out of nightclub speakers, it was an incitement to dance-floor insurrection.

“Welcome to the Party” was the anchor of Pop Smoke’s debut album, “Meet the Woo,” but the real emotional core was “PTSD.” On an album full of tossed-off threats and rowdy bluster, a soundtrack for rumbles in dark basements, here was a song about the cost of all that conflict. “My PTSD starting to kick in so I gotta get high,” he rapped, before detailing all the things he needed to escape from. On other songs, he sounded ready for war; on this one, he sounded like he’d just come home from one: “I spent 20 on my wrist and 20 on a chain/I be spoiling myself so I can ease the pain.”

And yet there is no ease to be found.

Pop Smoke, who was killed at the age of 20 early Wednesday morning at a home in Los Angeles, was at that ascendant place in his career just after local renown bubbles up into something bigger and more promising. The place where new opportunities compete for space with old tensions. He’d just released his second album, “Meet the Woo, Vol. 2,” which debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard album chart, and he was evolving from the most charismatic figure in the Brooklyn drill scene — one of the most vibrant in hip-hop right now — into a genuine breakout star, not bound by place or style.