Here’s the thing about Post Malone: Post Malone is ridiculous. It can’t be denied. To avoid saying “Post Malone is ridiculous” in a piece about Post Malone would be a journalistic failure, like forgetting to note that George Washington was the first President of the United States. It is a central fact of him. On Post’s 2018 album beerbongs & bentleys, he earnestly sings the words “beautiful boobies.” If you are above the age of 12, either chronologically or emotionally, the way he sings these two words together will bring you great pain and embarrassment, particularly if you are within earshot of another adult human over said age.

And yet: The way he sings the words “beautiful boobies” is alarmingly tender. The way Post Malone sings “beautiful boobies” is also the way Post Malone sings “I promise, I swear to you, I’ll be OK/You’re only the love of my life,” on “Better Now,” the album’s third Top 10 smash. It is the same way he sings “I just keep on wishing that the money made you stay” on “Rich & Sad.” His voice is a more expressive instrument than any song with the lyrics “Baby bust it open like woo-hoo” (that’s “Takin’ Shots”) should ever demand. The gap between the puerility of what he is often saying and the pure yearning with which he is expressing it is startling. I keep tripping over the gap and retracing my steps.

The Sublime connection seems preordained. Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell and Post Malone are spiritual cousins. Like Nowell and his band of frat-reggae darlings, Post has a sweet tooth for the music of other cultures and not much interest in figuring out how he fits into them. Like Nowell, he is often boorish and obnoxious, on-record and off. And like Nowell, he has a melodic gift that soars above all of these glaring flaws, and a raw, flexible voice that bends his music in all sorts of surprising directions.

Take “Stay,” the acoustic ballad buried in the back half of beerbongs & bentleys. Post wrote the song alongside his vocal engineer Louis Bell and a songwriter named Andrew Watt. Harmonically, “Stay” hangs between F and C keys, a misty realm of suspension lit by online tutorials for Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song.” The seven-note melodic turnaround that happens every few measures steps with catlike grace between the two keys. It’s a pretty standard, if sophisticated, lighter-waver, one that could have been a hit at any point in the past 30 years.

It’s what Post does with it, though, that makes it enthralling. He unsettles “Stay” from the inside, investing it with so much contradictory emotion it no longer feels like a ballad. His vocal take is all churned up, by turns resigned, furious, tender, and unable to stay with one emotion for more than a breath or two. He makes “fuck off” sound sweet and “Tell me that it’s all OK” sound furious. He allows a tremor, too brittle and nervous to call vibrato and too subtle for a yodel, to disturb his voice. (Post has called it a “kind of goat-ish thing I do with my throat.”) He doesn’t let a microsecond of the song just sit there.

He runs around inside of “Rich & Sad” the same way—wild-eyed, flushed, a desperate man trapped inside a party song. Normally, the way artists carry off the short, choppy, singsong cadences so common to pop rap in 2018 is to blend their voices with the chirpy tone of the instrumentals: Think of Swae Lee, or Lil Uzi Vert. Not Post. When he hits the high note of “I would throw it all away,” he scrapes near-panic, like a cat being forced into a carrier. His lyrics may be having the time of their lives, but Post sounds like he’s scanning the fire exits.