Then came Yeezus, where frightening noise and gothic undertones accompanied the most lewd and callous lyrics of his career. Only on that album’s final track did the psychosexual frightfest end as West rapped about settling into a committed relationship with someone uninterested in threesomes. That song, “Bound 2,” generated the famous music video of West being straddled by his then-fiancée Kim Kardashian on a motorcycle in front of a Lisa Frank-style sunset. It sounded a lot like gospel.

Pablo then, necessarily addresses the question of how Kanye’s feeling as a bound man. The answer seems to be that it’s making him feel horny. There’s lots of dirty talk here, but it’s confined to speculative boasts, memories, and references to “wifey.” The now-infamous admission that he feels like he and Taylor Swift “might still have sex” is less about Swift than about West’s own delusions—that “still” is the sign of someone leaving doors open in his mind that he knows should be closed by now (though Swift is right to say that the contention he made her famous is rooted in sexism, as many West statements are). “Freestyle 4” uses a slasher-film arrangement as West imagines turning the party he’s at into an orgy. And then there’s “FML,” the great somber reckoning, where Kanye finally makes explicit the push-pull that has ruled the album: resisting the temptation to “fuck my life up” by cheating on Kim.

His own voice on Pablo often plays a fascinatingly minor role, purposefully drowned out by samples and guests. “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1,” for example, begins with West considering a model’s bleached body parts, but before it becomes clear whether he’s referring to an affair, a fantasy, a memory, or his own wife, he shuts up: “She get under your skin if you let her / She get under your skin if you … uh / I don’t even want to talk about it.” That’s right—Kanye West censors himself. In “Pt. 2,” the song melts into a lengthy sample of the rapper Desiigner’s still-rising hit “Panda,” a particularly delectable entry in the canon of songs about having multiple cars and multiple girlfriends. The moment at first feels inexplicable: Couldn’t he just get his labelmate to write a new verse? But then it sinks in that West might be grabbing this other guy’s song to show how he’s now gawking at the swaggering single-rapper lifestyle from afar.

It’s not that West isn’t ever swaggering, himself. “Famous,” the closest thing to potential radio pop that Pablo has, features Rihanna interpolating Nina Simone for a massive hook and eventually breaks into a gleeful sample of Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam” after West lay down a series of brags. But even then, there are flashes of dreadful reality to cause vertigo—e.g. “I just copped a jet to fly over personal debt” ($53 million, he later clarified on Twitter). The other would-be bangers seem to carry some ambivalence with them, too. “Highlights,” featuring West talking sexcapades and Young Thug wailing over a skeletal but infectious rhythm, is preceded by “Low Lights,” a two-minute testimony about wishing God would heal unbearable pain. Another bright spot, “Waves,” might be meant—in name and in its glorious, pulsating sound—to approximate the feeling of an MDMA high, among other things. In the chorus, Chris Brown sings “waves don’t die”—one of many times that the album pretends that momentary pleasures are permanent.