The same week Future announced the release date for Dirty Sprite 2, his third official retail release, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto. Its data has been revealing the dwarf planet as an icy, complicated world, still in geological flux, marked by a bright, heart-shaped feature in the center of much darker terrain. It’s not just an apt parallel for the rapper, who named his expectation-defying debut after the misunderstood planet: it’s the ultimate symbol for the latest and most relevant phase of Future’s career. The stars have never been more uncannily aligned for the man born Nayvadius Wilburn, the reigning king of Atlanta who’s deployed a trilogy of album-quality mixtapes since last October to recapture some of the goodwill lost as he’s figured out what kind of artist he wanted to be over the past three years.

There’s been a backlash against sophomore album Honest in the past year—even Future has distanced himself from the project, which he released before the ugly demise of his relationship with ex-fiancée Ciara. But Honest wasn’t a bad album by any means; it was just confused. It was obvious Future was being tugged in too many directions at once: the sledgehammer street bangers, the poignant lone ranger ballads, the big-name collabs with Kanye and Pharrell. The album’s emotional nucleus was "I Be U", the ex-romantic’s most stunning love song to date. But it was no coincidence that it saw Future learning to empathize with his partner by literally becoming her, projecting himself onto her being (compare it to the similarly-titled but far less resonant bonus track "I’ll Be Yours"). He was caught between dissonant identities: the wide-screen romantic who made songs with Miley Cyrus, and the hustler from Little Mexico, Zone 6, who flirted with death on record. "I think I lost my heartbeat for a second and a half," he chanted dispassionately on the title track of Dirty Sprite, the 2011 mixtape to which DS2 nods with its title.

"Tried to make me a pop star, and they made a monster," Future snarls on "I Serve the Base", a skuzzy, fiendish track that busts down DS2’s doors early, its Metro Boomin beat built around what sounds like a sacrificial lamb’s last minutes of life. That pivot from hero to villain is the album’s central conceit, the culmination of the journey from Monster’s wounded hedonism to the numb howl of 56 Nights. The cruel irony is that Future was great at being a pop star, at least in a mercenary sense; Pluto, with its glossy ballads about looking for love with a flashlight, remains one of the best major label rap debuts of the last five years. But he remained visibly uncomfortable in the spotlight, stepping out in matching designer with Ciara like Atlanta’s begrudging Montague.

There is no such self-consciousness on DS2. Its universe is bleak and unforgiving, a redemption story for a man who is certain it’s too late for his soul to be redeemed; instead of a triumphal arc, we burrow deeper and deeper into Future’s dystopia. Before we hear his voice at all, on intro track "Thought It Was a Drought", we hear the slosh of codeine stirred into soda, the dull snap of ice cubes crackling in styrofoam. The only songs that resemble anything like radio hits are mostly pre-released and relegated to the bonus tracks ("Fuck Up Some Commas", "Trap Niggas"), and the only feature is Drake, who does a commendably bitter Future impression on "Where Ya At". There is no room for misinterpretation: Future does not want to be your role model. This is music for nihilists, for the reckless, for those who embrace darkness because they don’t see another option.

With his run of post-Honest releases, Future has made it clear who he would like to speak for, and who he is no longer interested in courting, and his recent work is an obvious gesture towards his day-one fanbase who supported him pre-Pluto. Most of the production is handled by Metro Boomin and 808 Mafia’s Southside, with a few appearances from Zaytoven and a small handful of Atlanta trap mainstays. All these guys have an obvious synergy with Future, with whom they’ve worked for years, and their chemistry provides a cohesiveness and clarity of vision missing from his previous two albums.

But as a stylist and a technical rapper, Future’s operating on a level unmatched in his five-year discography, early mixtapes and all. As a storyteller, he’s evolved considerably, his lyrics crystallizing into a specific poetry. "A product of them roaches in them ashtrays/ I inhale the love on a bad day/ Baptized inside purple actavis," he raps on "I Serve the Base". Miniscule yet significant details come into crisp focus, like a series of tightly framed, disorienting closeups. On "Kno the Meaning", which doubles as an oral history of the Beast Mode and 56 Nights tapes, we meet his Uncle Ronnie who washed cars and Uncle Don who robbed banks, snapshots of the men he once looked up to. Future was always straightforward, never ashamed to confess his depression or infatuation, but the narratives never felt so focused, nuanced, or vulnerable than here.

Lucidity is a poignant theme in his recent work, since he seems to be constantly seeking to escape it. For Future, razor-sharp memory is a curse, one that even month-long benders cannot break. (He spells this out on "Hardly", one of Monster’s more underrated tracks; "Hardly, hardly, hardly forget anything," he croaks, obsessing over moments with a deceased friend.) Thus is the strange and singular beauty of DS2, as ugly as its themes may be: it is at once detail-oriented and hazy, painfully coherent while advocating against coherence, creating an atmosphere like club spotlights piercing through fog machine and blunt smoke, or the beam of a lighthouse searching in the dark for a shipwreck.

This dissonance creates the album’s essential tension between what Future literally describes and what he truly feels. "I pour two zips/ I’m feeling way better," he crows on swirling, melodramatic "Slave Master". "Way better," here, is fraught with subtext—the transcendent but fleeting relief of giving in to temptation. This isn’t an album that giddily champions substance abuse as a rock star trait, as his Future Hendrix persona once may have. Reckless drug talk and boilerplate trap themes are undercut by incessant bitterness, loathing, and nausea. "God blessing all the trap niggas" is more than just a shout-out to people who grew up like he did, it’s a sincere plea. "I know the devil is real," he promises on "Blood on the Money", one of the album’s most stunning productions, somehow austere and baroque at the same damn time. Future thumbs through blood-stained bills, reminded of the life from which he ascended but can’t ever really escape, as much as he may have tried.