In professional terms, Roc Marciano comes from nowhere. This website’s review for his staggering 2010 debut, Marcberg, refers to him as “a rapper associated with Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad,” a descriptor that was barely reductive at the time. Roc Marciano the person—that would be the 39-year-old Rakeem Calief Myer—comes from Ed Koch’s New York, a place that informs his work by way of syntax, slang, and a catalog of grainy samples that sound like they were lifted out of rainwater. It gave him train-rattling drums, too, but lately he’s been stripping those away.

The character that Marci has created on wax, the one with Isaac Hayes shades and Kevin McHale-colored fishscale, has been everywhere: Burkina Faso, Venezuela in his best dress clothes, chubby on a sunny beach, his gun in reach. Rosebudd’s Revenge, the long-awaited proper follow-up to 2012’s Reloaded, carries each piece of his style toward the extreme, which makes this his most confounding, and maybe his most singular work to date.

Impressive as it is on a formal level, Rosebudd’s Revenge also raises interesting questions about the inner workings of Marci’s mind. On “Gunsense,” he raps: “Motherfucker, this is art, you can’t just pick this apart/This not a hobby, this is therapy.” Those lines, defiant as they are, would be unremarkable coming from any number of rappers. But Roc Marciano records seldom feel like confessionals, at least in any recognizable sense; you don’t picture a pimp slumping into his therapist’s couch to talk about how flying in shooters from Jamaica makes him feel.

Marci’s trafficking in something more circuitous than a linear line from trauma to psychic baggage. Unlike his longtime collaborator, Ka—who appears here on the excellent “Marksmen,” and whose own solo work also explores just how lean New York can sound—Marci doesn’t write in monologue. Instead, he tends to stack images on top of one another, building it higher and higher until it can scrub blood off of Nikes or get the mink out of storage. See “Already,” where he raps, “Mahogany woodgrain all in the five-speed/Silk lay on me, pray for me/Eight million stories in the naked city/The humidity—it made the titties oil.” Later on the same song, he says that his jeans fit him like Springsteen, that his shoes cost as much as an MF DOOM verse, and “Fans demand new work, but I’m a man of few words.”

In each and every case, the point of view is slippery enough that you’re never quite sure who the speaker is, how literally a line should be taken, and whether its connection to subsequent lines is superficial, deeply important, or altogether non-existent. You don’t need to answer any of these questions to appreciate Marci’s Technicolor virtuosity. to follow him to murder scenes in Wichita (“Pimp Arrest”) or to Israeli hotel rooms (“Better Know”). But answering them might help to bridge the gap between Rakeem Myer and Roc Marciano—to see which of his too-vivid details are things he aspires to and which he sees as necessary evils.

As a writer, Marci’s gift is his ability to make evil seem impossibly slick; on “Burkina Faso,” he ends an armed robbery by telling his victim, “Keep the Dunks, I’m not a hipster,” then heads home and listens to Michael Bolton in the jacuzzi. Rosebudd’s Revenge isn’t as seamless as Marcberg or Reloaded, suffering from some fidelity issues and perhaps being a bit back-loaded, but it’s endlessly, almost impossibly entertaining. Even as he approaches middle age, Marci remains one of rap’s most brilliant stylists, the kind of artist who can make you wear out your rewind button despite being old enough to remember when you could wear out a rewind button.

Maybe the most aspirational line on the record is: “I’m just having fun with this, I live in comfort.” For all the death threats, all the cartoon luxury that Marci rattles off with a sneer, the underlying truth is that he’s a master technician who’s worked tirelessly, for years on end to hone an unmistakable style as a rapper, producer, and auteur. Maybe the most peaceful thing he can imagine—the beach where he can get chubby, as it were—would be fading back into the ether, content to know that after years of obscurity, he became one of the greatest, most influential rappers of the decade.