Slime Season 2 is Young Thug’s third full-length release in seven months, rounding out a productive streak as formidable as any of his peers'. We already knew he was rap’s most wildly creative stylist: a rogue alchemist of undiscovered melodies, an electrostatic bonding agent for new metaphors. Still, until now, it remained unclear whether he could broaden the scope of his talents beyond a song-by-song basis, channeling the constant spray of ideas into something built to last. Slime Season 2 edges further in that direction, a more carefully constructed work than its predecessor in every sense. And in small but significant bursts, it’s the first of his releases to begin to flesh out a real idea of Jeffrey Williams beyond the blinding veneer of experimentation. This is the sound of 2015’s most dazzling bar-for-bar rapper hitting his stride.

It’s a noticeable improvement over September’s Slime Season, but not because Thug’s rapping is evolving at that speed. Both projects are culled from archives of work presumably stretching back at least a year; there is almost no hint of chronology among these tracks. But where SS1 felt rambling and uneven, there is a clear sense of purpose to SS2, applying the cohesion of Barter 6 to SS1’s pop promise. His engineer Alex Tumay executive produced the project, and Thug benefits greatly from an editor: SS2 is nearly an hour and a half long, but it flows. The mood is woozy and nocturnal, Thug’s adlibs serving as his own echo in some damp subterranean cave. The production roster ranges from Atlanta’s most wanted (Metro Boomin, Southside, London On Da Track) to lesser-known collaborator Goose and—out of nowhere—Fool’s Gold blogwave holdover Treasure Fingers, but all of their contributions blend into the tape’s murky cool.

Thug's lyrics are studded with the glorious non sequiturs you expect: baffling asteroids of one-liners, orbiting in isolation, that either mean nothing or hint at vast cosmological secrets. ("I look good as your dad on a Friday," from "Thief in the Night", is probably the former; "A wise man told me nothing," from tape standout "Raw (Might Just)", is unquestionably the latter.) But SS2’s most exciting developments are the rare moments Thug lowers his guard and focuses inward—something that’s only happened in glimpses until now. He darts between flashes of nostalgia, frank meditations on faithfulness and jealousy, nuggets of formative family history: "My nephew saw his daddy sent out home to the sky," he recalls on the queasy, wobbling "Beast".

But the moment that’s burned into my skull comes in the first verse of "Never Made Love", a Rich Homie Quan duet left over from the Rich Gang era. Quan brings pathos to the hook and gets out of the way: The song's main attraction is Thug’s sincere and complicated grappling with defensive detachment that taps into a well of long-buried family trauma. With it comes perhaps the most vulnerable and mystically cogent mini-narrative of his entire catalog, one I can’t help but quote in full: "My lookout man was my right-hand man, but he was wrong, though/ Then I seen some diamonds come off of my neighbor’s porch/ And it was her/ She had a Louis Vuitton purse clean as detergent/ She had the same exact face as my brother’s nurse/ And he in a hearse/ I never looked at it for what it’s worth." It’s pure poetry.

Critics have called Thug’s music surrealist, but SS2 presents him instead as a storyteller in the magical realist tradition, drawing glimmers of nonplussed fascination out of the rational world. Within this context, his habit for working in small-scale, occasionally disjointed bursts, recording each line spontaneously, makes perfect sense. His thoughts fracture and wander down unpredictable paths, forcing us to draw connections in non-linear ways.

At its core, magical realism suggests that the ultimate mystery in a logical world is man himself; its soft mysticism is a roundabout path to the heart. Above even the muddy, waterlogged sonics, the unifying thread here is intimacy. SS2 has Thug more transparent on love, trust, and heartbreak than ever before: "She Notice" and "Hey, I" stand out above the rest, unguarded and earnest and complicated as ever. He cheats, he stumbles, and then he attempts to deconstruct his own behavior, tracing the tangled roots of how 2015 rap’s greatest enigma came to be. Nearing the end of a landmark year, we still talk about Thug as a mystery: as transcending language, or as the ultimate triumph of style over substance. But the last thing we hear on SS2, closing out a chopped and screwed version of previously leaked ballad "Love Me Forever", is a hopeful yelp: "And I just wanna be loved!" It doesn’t get clearer, or more human, than that.