Burna Boy was supposed to get the coveted crossover cosign from Drake. The two had first linked up in London, where the rapper reportedly shared his vision for a “playlist” collecting sounds from around the world. The Afropop-dancehall hybridist ended up submitting five tracks for the project. Ultimately, though, only one, a song titled “More Life,” made the cut—and even then, it was relegated to a reverb-soaked outro to “Get It Together,” itself a rework of South African singer Bucie’s “Superman” featuring Durban house pioneer Black Coffee and Midlands R&B upstart Jorja Smith. With Outside, the Nigerian musician finally gets a chance to show off his song in full—it’s the first track on the album—and to flaunt his own skill at musical synthesis.

Some of that facility probably has something to do with his musical background. Burna Boy, born Damini Ebunoluwa Ogalu, started making beats on FruityLoops when he was 10. His father played dancehall records in their home; his grandfather was once Fela Kuti’s manager. These influences, alongside his own interest in American rap music—“I just wanted to listen to DMX,” he told The FADER in 2016—form the elements of bricolage that Burna Boy calls “afrofusion” and is fine-tuned on Outside. Songs like “Giddem” and “Ye,” which interpolates Fela’s “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood,” take the playfulness of 2000s pop-rap and shroud it in guitar; “Sekkle Down” is a romantic take on dancehall that features UK rapper and fellow diasporic hybridist J Hus. With Lily Allen on “Heaven’s Gate,” hints of highlife guitar and road rap merge into something new, but just as vibrant as its sources.

He is most confident on “Ph City Vibration.” It doubles as a mini-biography (“I was born inna the teaching hospital/The 2nd of July of 1991”) and an ode to his hometown, Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s River States, replete with references to roasted plantains and fish and the city’s soccer stadium, Yakubu Gowon Stadium—which he still calls by its old name, Liberation, much as a lifelong Mets fan might reflexively refer to Shea. But not all of the album’s influences are as sturdy. The title track, which features UK pop singer Mabel, is laced with EDM and while it is fun, it doesn’t have the same life as the rest of the album. Burna Boy says that the track was recorded on Pete Townshend’s studio boat, though, and that added mythos gives it a little bit more juice.

This versatility is one of the reasons that, alongside WizKid and Davido, Burna Boy is one Nigeria’s preeminent musical ambassadors. Where WizKid softens some of the edges of Afrobeats, making the genre more familiar to newcomers, Burna’s output is more kaleidoscopic. It makes Outside a fine lesson in mixing genres without making mud.