It's tempting to suggest there's nothing subtle about Tacoma's ILLFIGHTYOU. Everything you need to know about them is in their name, right? All caps, no spaces. (As opposed to all caps with spaces.) The three members are named UGLYFRANK, Khris P, and EvergreenOne. Both of their releases, and all songs on each, are tagged in the same ALLCAPSNOSPACES fashion. A casual listen reveals a sound that's part-West Coast shit talk, part-Pharrell layered beats, and all brash. You can probably almost hear a song based on these ingredients in your head right now.

And maybe your estimation wouldn't be too far off, but what you would miss would be how charming and fun their music has consistently been, from even before their 2013 self-titled full-length when they were just frequently-hilarious dudes with a Tumblr. Like a glass of water after 10 shots of whiskey, ILLFIGHTYOU's CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP chases this year's glut of serious-minded spring and summer hip-hop albums. Two years after their debut, the appeal of ILLFIGHTYOU is even more apparent—they sound effortless, and they're clearly having a blast.

Khris P and UGLYFRANK trade verses with the temerity (if not complexity) that made Clipse so much fun, or the 2014 model of Rich Gang so electrifying. And ILLFIGHTYOU's sound definitely owes a lot to not just Clipse, but a lot of mid-'00s Pharrell work: think of the line Fam-Lay toed between menacing and joyful. FRANK grounds the music with a delivery that's both deadpan and knives-out (the first verse on the album includes vivid images like "sniffing coke up in the movie theater" and "I'm angry and hella faded, I'm flipping vehicles back") but also works as Khris's logical foil: Khris has a naturally mercurial voice and he covers more territory, delivering the line "stacking turkey burgers on my damn plate" and bragging about having your girl in his mentions all in the same verse. His flow is so natural that "Oracle" fades with him still rapping: The sense you get is of having caught a tantalizing glimpse of a guy with better things to do than rap this effortlessly.

"FLASH" is the best song here, opening with Bill Paxton's famous line from Aliens, "game over, man, game over!" It contains my favorite line, Frank's "Had a dream I got murked and bought a ticket to heaven/ Nah I woke up, popped a perc and I purchased another necklace," which somehow interpolates a dark, self-effacing Kanye line from "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" into something even darker. The line is punctuated by Khris yelling "hey!" in the background, underlining how much fun these guys are having trading verses. And then the chorus riffs on Tribe's "Award Tour" just because it can. The recipe is simple, but potent: casual irreverence with a pinch of nihilism.

In 2015, with the Internet bubble of "weird rappers" giving way to either novelty hits like "CoCo", the pop appeal of "Trap Queen", or whatever the Awful Records guys feel like doing, ILLFIGHTYOU occupy an interesting middle space: their in-house produced beats knock and sound 0f-the-moment, but the in-jokes and hooks have an almost throwback appeal to them. It's helpful to have someone around to remind you that rap doesn't have to be so dark to make an impression or communicate something meaningful, and in this context ILLFIGHTYOU are surprisingly refreshing. When the last time you heard it like that?