Jazz Cartier is Toronto's first post-Drake rapper, an artist who benefits from Drake’s razing of American rap’s once-inviolable boundaries, but with no formal ties to the OVO crew. Jazz, who also goes by Jacuzzi La Fleur, has managed to build a sizable local fan base—still rare in a city long referred to by local artists as the Screwface Capital—by establishing a grimier counter-narrative to Drake’s opulent, uptown vision of a city newly christened The Six. On his polished debut album, Marauding in Paradise, he deploys the new nickname just once, on "Local Celebrity Freestyle", setting up his own us-vs-them, downtown/uptown dichotomy: "I’m from Toronto, but they call it the Six."

But Marauding isn’t antagonistic: it just offers a counterpoint, a glimpse into a different, younger subset of Toronto’s art and party scene. Living in a city giddy off one man’s come up, Jazz prefers to move to the sound of his own voice. And his elegant, elastic bark is loud and clear: The best moments on Marauding are fearless, theatrical. Jazz assumes the bluster of a corner preacher on "Guardian Angel" and gives the intro track about soured relationships a gothic vibe, reminiscent of the skits on early Dungeon Family records. (After a brief verse, the song tumbles into a snippet from Mista’s "Blackberry Molasses", confirming the allusion.) Elsewhere, on "New Religion" and "Holy Shit", he’s unafraid to shriek, wail and growl into the mic.

To allow Marauding a chance to connect, you have to push past some of the overt sonic and aesthetic allusions to Houston rapper Travis Scott, which compromise the sound of an original voice shining through. On the evidence of Marauding, however, we should give ‘Cuzzi some time to distill this influence. There’s exciting trial-and-error happening everywhere on the album: His willingness to play with flows, his eye for detail, a surprising grip of giddy, geeky quips ("I’m Kanye with shrugs"; rhyming Dom Perignon with M. Night Shyamalan) and the ability to work with his right-hand-man producer, Lantz. Together, they temper the record’s sometimes-overwhelming maximalism at the right moments.

The tape lacks a signature song, one that sums up the world Jazz lives in and invites us in. "Switch" and "The Downtown Cliché" feature the on-trend pairing of bottom-feeding bass/triplet cavalcades. Lantz distills a variety of vibes, from post-trap bangers and PARTYNEXTDOOR-style bedroom soul to Easy Mo Bee boom bap and the Vine-brittle blap of Terio’s theme song. Most compelling are his transitions, particularly on songs like the beautiful Toro Y Moi flip, "Rose Quartz/Like, Crazy", and "Flashiago/A Sober Drowning".

Here are some things we learn about Jacuzzi from Marauding, though: he is, or has been, a drug-addled party kid and a lovesick lothario, and has gone from being the only black kid in an Idaho classroom to too expensive for your features. It’s not easy to inhabit these identities on a single album—let alone your first—but Jazz is agile enough to pull it off and, like Toronto, he’s still growing.