After stalled apprenticeships with Pete Rock and Busta Rhymes, Roc Marciano arrived with 2010’s self-produced Marcberg, a grayscale triumph which blended elements of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and Dah Shinin’ into an intricate and nearly impenetrable statement of purpose. Landing just before iTunes began ceding ground to Spotify, Marcberg showcased an auteur who never broke character, an unsentimental diarist nevertheless obsessed with thread counts and lacquer finishes. The drums snapped and the samples felt three-dimensional; when Marci described the temperature, you felt it in your knuckles. Hazily rooted in blaxploitation slang, cocaine-’80s touchstones, and outer-borough ’90s grit, the Hempstead provenance of Marciano’s bygone New York makes sense once you consider that the Notorious B.I.G.’s childhood home currently rents for $4,000 a month.

For a few years, it seemed that Marcberg and its follow-ups would endure as brilliant aberrations, suggestive of an alternate timeline in which Mr. Smith and Life After Death were never released, and gloss never visited hip-hop’s birth city. But as rap labels cratered and New York City’s primacy waned, his records became foundational texts for a wave of neo-classicists from declining industrial burgs. Among the immediate disciples of Marci—marketed less like rap stars than outsider artists—are Buffalo’s flamboyant Griselda collective; Newark’s Mach-Hommy; Crimeapple, a Colombian-American oddball from Hackensack whose flow lands a good half-beat behind the snare; and Marci’s Hempstead neighbors SmooVth and Hus KingPin, whose drawling rasps are more Corleone than Wu-Tang. Even more than their mechanics and taste in samples, these rappers owe Marciano their narrative scopes. The scenes rarely develop into full sagas, but they’re photographic in their detail.

Marcielago serves as a capstone for Marci’s decade, a mix of evocative soul samples and stripped-down loops paired with his trademark gnomic flow. There are few hooks or melodies in any traditional sense, and he prefers soft percussion when he doesn’t forgo it entirely. He remains an artist for whom scene-setting remains the platonic ideal: You’re never left wondering what kind of sauce bathes the filet, or what show’s playing on the fuzzy TV in the corner. Sometimes, his narratives seem shaped by the dictates of the rhymes themselves. On “Richard Gear,” the arrival of a borrowed Sentra renders a victim’s t-shirt magenta; on “Choosin Fees,” a “lady of the evenin’” elicits the theory that “if we had babies they’d be heathens.”

The opening verse of “Puff Daddy” is an exemplary study in narrative economy. It’s also the one track on Marcielago that might sound at home on another artist’s record: The distorted piano chords and Bad Boy-referencing title feel nicked from the Griselda playbook, itself so heavily predicated on Marciano’s work. But when Griselda frontman Westside Gunn appears on “Boosie Fade,” the contrast between the two vocalists is electric—no torch-passing moments here. Marciano’s ground-level camera homes in on the subtle details that tend to elude his contemporaries, and he remains the most colorful character to appear in front of his own lens.