Give Eminem credit: As a label head, he learns from his mistakes. It’s been eight years since Shady Records stopped Yelawolf’s career cold with Radioactive, a misguided bid to repackage the rough-edged rapper as a crossover star, and since then Marshall Mathers has stopped treating his signees as lottery tickets. He’s taken an especially hands-off approach with Griselda, the bloody-knuckled Buffalo trio whose Shady Records debut never veers from the hardcore hip-hop of their self-released solo projects and mixtapes. While their mastery of mid-’90s-worshipping East Coast rap has earned them a devoted following, Shady has bowed to the reality that the gritty trio is an inherently niche act. No Skylar Grey feature or Alex da Kid production is going to broaden their appeal.

Brothers Conway and Westside Gunn and first cousin Benny the Butcher don’t even bother with choruses, stitching their coke-dusted, bullet-riddled crime tales together with ad-libbed gun sounds instead. Griselda’s first full group outing, WWCD offers something their solo efforts only featured intermittently: interplay. On “Chef Dreds” and “Scotties,” the relatives trade bars and finish each other’s thoughts, playing Westside Gunn’s nasally shit talk against Conway’s cold slur and Benny the Butcher’s bruiser swagger. These three are at their best at their most untamed, and WWCD is the crew’s most unrelentingly raucous showcase yet.

In keeping with its predecessors, the project was produced by Griselda’s house beat makers Daringer and Beat Butcha, Wu-Tang evangelists who serve the same dependable meal again and again, never offering a twist. On the crew’s solo projects, that monotony could begin to tire, but here it keeps the focus where it belongs, on the trio’s brutal wordplay and sour back-and-forth. These three have no problem sustaining intrigue on their own.

Griselda is hardly the only crew nailing the feel of ’90s hip-hop, but they also conjure the heightened reality of the era in a way few of its imitators do. Without succumbing to silliness, they push the violence to fantastical extremes, half horrific, half cartoonish (the interlude “Kennedy” is just 42 seconds of Westside Gunn repeating “blow your fucking face off” and making boom noises). They don’t skimp on the punchlines, either, especially Benny: “I’m 5’8” but 6’11” if I stand on my bricks,” he boasts on “Moselle.”

Most of the album’s guests slot themselves seamlessly into the mood, including Raekwon, who offers a symbolic cosign of the crew on the spoken opener “Marchello,” and 50 Cent, who relishes rolling around in the mud on “City on the Map.” The glaring exception is the most high-profile one: Eminem, who does his equivalent of Diddy dancing in Bad Boy videos on the album-closing remix of the Conway track “Bang.” For 46 showy bars it’s all about Shady as Eminem runs through his greatest hits, spitting hyper-technical dick jokes and reminiscing about the great beefs of his TRL heyday. It’s not ideal—the verse feels pumped in from another plane of existence, and it undoes the grimy mood the rest of the record sets so meticulously—but it’s easy enough to skip. And if Eminem’s star power is what it takes to introduce this trio to a slightly wider audience, then so be it.