The chronically overlooked Detroit rapper Boldy James has been making excellent street rap for a decade. His 2011 mixtape, Trappers Alley: Pros and Cons, sprawls across 28 tracks and improbably holds attention with quick cuts in mood and tempo. Boldy fits into a broad idea of his city’s grimy rap lineage, but owes little to the stylistic trends that have emerged from there in the 2010s—you will find in him little of Doughboyz Cashout’s manic dread or Danny Brown’s eccentricity. While the 2015 Trapper’s Alley sequel and his 2017 mixtape House of Blues dabbled in faster, more maximalist production, he works best when he works methodically, finding crevices in a skeletal frame.

Boldy writes without show, in short vignettes or standalone thoughts. Ninety seconds into The Price of Tea in China, his excellent new album with the producer Alchemist, he recalls his grandmother “cussin’ me out/‘Quit running in and out the house/What’s all the fuss about? It’s either cut me in or cut it out.’” His verses build tension slowly and resist the urge toward melodrama or moralizing; his voice is deep enough to project menace or instill calm without ever seeming to strain or slide out of pocket. Having worked twice before with Alchemist, this is familiar ground—or as familiar as Alchemist’s beats can ever be, as they molt from lush to serrated. Boldy responds by delivering what is one of the best, most immersive rap albums of the year so far.

As underground rap producers go, the Beverly Hills-bred Alchemist is this century’s great album-length auteur. He reinvigorated the late Mobb Deep legend Prodigy’s career with 2007’s minor masterpiece Return of the Mac. He was responsible for Curren$y’s 2011 Covert Coup, one of the prolific New Orleans rapper’s most celebrated releases. Boldy and Alchemist teamed up in 2013 for the well-received My 1st Chemistry Set, and again last year for the brief Boldface EP. Even as the economic (dis)incentives for sampling keep mutating, Alchemist crate-digs aggressively, turning out fascinatingly textured, sample-based records at a daunting rate.

On China his beats vary from the vaguely wistful (“Pinto”) to the skull-rattling (“Giant Slide”); some songs sound like slow creeps through mud (“Mustard”) and others recall the rhythmic creaking of a hotel bed frame (“Run-Ins”). Crucially, they make space for Boldy, who raps here with a disarming poise whether he’s quipping that a rival crew’s members “look like a boy band” or dispensing quasi-military wisdom like “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” His voice at times recalls the Gary native Freddie Gibbs, who appears here on “S.N.O.R.T.” But where Gibbs likes to lapse into quick, technical passages of double-time (he does so here), Boldy centers himself at a midtempo, giving his verses a complexity that emerges only on repeat listens.

For a lesser writer or vocalist, that might be a recipe for dry songs, but China is mesmerizing in its minimalism. His near-metronomic control also means that, when Boldy for once turns to a more ostentatious style—the extraordinary Vince Staples duet “Surf & Turf,” where he raps entirely in a cascading, tightly wound meter—it doubles as a reminder of the careful construction elsewhere.

Boldy’s verses are webs of evocative detail: jail tats that linger from teenage years, insomniac drives down to Kentucky, gloved hands clutching guns, dealers huddled outside in Nike tech fabrics, a son who thinks his road-tripping dad doesn’t love him, Pyrexes full of dope that looks like oatmeal, stolen pills to salve a grandmother’s throat cancer, cars set to cruise control to eliminate variables, half-kilos of coke stuffed under mattresses like grain in a silo. These fragmented scenes are littered with enough Detroit street names that you become sure you could find the Citgo or Kroger in question. In fact, the bulk of China is so richly specific that Boldy earns the latitude to yada-yada an entire murder, to chilling effect. On “Giant Slide,” he wraps up a man’s story like this: “Now he out in Memphis, Tenn., future looking bleak/It took a week, but when they caught up to him, he got put to sleep.”

The Price of Tea in China is not a creative breakthrough marked by a new production palette or a leap in writing style. It’s the result of two superb technicians slowly whittling away the excess material from what was already a singular sound. It opens with an isolated piano and no drums and ends with what sounds like a villain’s theme from a B-movie mafia thriller; its great trick is to be so expertly crafted that you scarcely notice the jaw-clenching stakes until it’s already too late.