[As XXXTentacion’s “Skins” arrives, the battle over his legacy rages on.]

On his previous albums, XXXTentacion was working through the molting of genres in real time — hip-hop, emo, R&B, indie rock. He borrowed from them widely and merged them intuitively, part of a generation of young performers dismantling the frameworks they were handed. He had a gift for channeling disaffection; the texture of his recordings was disarmingly raw, which led to wide, rabid embrace.

Image “Skins” is XXXTentacion’s third studio album. Credit...

There is some of that here, but only in fragmentary form. Lonely emo guitar leads off “Staring at the Sky,” and the hook, such as it is, has XXXTentacion singing, “I was staring at the sky/Singing toxic lullabies” with pop-punk cheek. “What Are You So Afraid Of” sounds like a sketch of an Iron & Wine song. At the end of “One Minute,” the only song featuring a guest — Kanye West — XXXTentacion howls in disorienting metalcore style. West does more rapping on this track than XXXTentacion does on the whole album, capturing the paranoia of a year in which he has been pilloried for his politics and for embracing collaborators with problematic records: “Now your name is tainted, by the claims they painting/The defendant is guilty, no one blames the plaintiff.”

In a handful of moments, XXXTentacion’s capacity for tapping into anxiety and emotional thunderstorms makes for something compelling, like on “Train Food,” an extended allegory about death, or perhaps a reckoning with having been abused: “Trying to scream for hope, just a shoulder that you can lean on/But ain’t nobody coming/So you scream on and scream on and scream on.” It’s harrowing, and also delivered casually, which renders it even more disturbing.

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If he is addressing the criminal allegations he faced during his life here, it is only in oblique ways: On “Guardian Angel,” he raps, “I apologize, ’cause I couldn’t see the pain in your damn eyes.”

But since XXXTentacion’s death, the Miami-Dade County state attorney’s office has released a graphic recording of him seemingly admitting to crimes in a 27-minute tape made around the time of his 2016 arrest. That audio is far more potent than anything on “Skins,” and once you’ve heard it, it is hard to hear much else.