“Die Like a Rockstar” also, though, did exactly the thing that Brown’s Twitter spree took aim at: treat self-destructive behavior as entertaining, sexing up tragedy. Brown’s music, like so much music and art about drugs and depression, has often staggered along the line between cautionary confession and exciting spectacle—or highlighted how there really might not be a line between those two things at all. “What people don’t understand is a lot of those songs are about depression,” he told Stereogum. “‘Smokin & Drinkin’ to forget about it, just partying to get away from all your problems,” he added, referring to the name of one of his hits.

His new album, Atrocity Exhibition, works to make clearer that Brown’s problems aren’t fun. It takes its title from a song by Joy Division on which Ian Curtis, who killed himself before its release, sung about insane asylums where voyeurs paid to watch the patients. And the opener’s title, “Downward Spiral,” calls back to the 1994 masterpiece album of the same name by Nine Inch Nails, one of the all-time-great bands for making deep emotional trauma into a fun scream-along time via pop hooks and disco beats. Brown’s not doing that. The dazzling and difficult Atrocity Exhibition pushes Brown’s sound in more extreme, musically innovative directions to mimic the extremity that’s been in his words all along.

The album opens with what sounds like a band in warm-up, a drummer messing around but finding no groove, a guitar pealing out scattered notes but no riff—a beat that will by the end of the record seem typical, courtesy of producer Paul White. Brown narrates an awful drug comedown, and when it begins to seem like he’s getting back to bragging about sex he takes the story to a place that male pop artists simply don't ever go: “Had a threesome last night, ain’t matter what it cost / Couldn’t it get hard, tried to stuff it in soft.” Later in the song, he recounts feeling numb to everybody telling him he has a lot to be proud of; in interviews, he’s located the album’s storyline as depicting the period after XXX gained him wide recognition.

From there, Atrocity Exhibition has the feeling of a montage, flashing back and forward in time, telescoping in or broadening out, often in search of the source of Brown’s woes. For its second track, “Tell Me What I Don’t Know,” he beams back to his days as school-age drug dealer, a period when he was “naive to the outcome” and landed behind bars. A morose synth line reminiscent of a ’90s computer-game death sequence loops as Brown raps not in his trademark yelp but in an even, low speaking voice: “Shit is like a cycle / You get out, I go in, this is not the life for us.” It’s the sound of existential doubt and fear being planted at an early age.

Elsewhere, rap success itself comes off as the inner villain on woozy tracks like “Rolling Stone,” which revives the unhappy rock-star comparisons, and “Lost,” a portrait of shut-in hedonism. He perks up, wild-eyed, for the extraordinary “Aint It Funny,” powered by blasts of noise that distill the disaffection of peak Iggy Pop as Brown boasts about his lyrical agility—“Verbal couture / Parkour / With the metaphors”—and his drugs (“The rocks bout the size / As the teeth in Chris Rock's mouth”). There’s the bizarrely infectious “White Lines,” where a keyboard line tracks Brown’s up-and-down vocal melody for a creepy funhouse vibe. He’s partying on tour, hoping that the latest line of coke isn’t the one that kills him.