From the DC Universe to the internet writ large, JPEGMAFIA’s heroes span genres and mediums. The producer and rapper’s pantheon is expansive and colorful, a bustling splash page of influences and pop culture totems. While JPEG has never downplayed the prominent roles that anime, video games, and wrestling play in his music, the adrenalized politics of his past projects sometimes obscured that scope. Listening to a song like “I Just Killed a Cop Now I’m Horny,” for instance, the morose Ai Aso sample always felt overshadowed by the flamboyant title and JPEG’s anti-cop lyrics. All My Heroes Are Cornballs adjusts that imbalance by laying bare the sprawling collage in his brain and showcasing how seamlessly it all fits together. The record feels like a public access show on an interdimensional cable channel: unhinged and trippy, but still deeply earnest.

All My Heroes is a significant departure from his earlier work. But for as dense as it sounds, there’s a quiet accessibility to how JPEG performs and structures these songs. He adopts gendered terms like thot, slut, and girl, leaning into Peggy, his feminine nickname, and stages a few songs from the perspective of a woman. It’s unclear what they might signify about his own identity, but they further the idea that his fearlessness is his superpower. As a producer, he builds his hyper-syncretic songs around concord rather than contrast. The distorted guitar riff on “Rap Grow Old and Die x No Child Left Behind” acts as a springboard for the vocals and other instruments, converting all the friction into motion. The crackle of a recorded fire on “DOTS FREESTYLE REMIX” fills the spaces between JPEG’s boasts and the cutesy synth tune. He’s adept at making disparate sounds and images cohere without sacrificing texture or invoking an exaggerated sense of audacity. In a year full of nods to diaspora and lineage, his productions are a reminder that even randomness can be personal.

Sounds and sequences that would have been codas or flourishes in his past music are allowed to fully blossom, even in passing. “Kenan Vs. Kel” shuffles through keyboard melodies before settling on a riff that morphs into a dusty beat. Then, halfway through, a crunchy power chord shows up and is stretched like sheet metal as it’s hammered with percussion. JPEG raps on both parts, and as busy as that sounds, the shifts are effortless, like swiping between smartphone apps. “Grimy Waifu,” a gun ode with a gorgeous downtempo backbeat, folds in flute spirals and acoustic guitar riffs as JPEG sings in AutoTune of his weapon’s commitment to him. It’s as ridiculous as it is dazzling.

Amid all the chaos, his rapping remains his greatest tool. JPEG is an impish writer and an athletic vocalist. He can slither in and out of rhythms and hopscotch through the densest arrangements without losing momentum. Here, he raps in compact spurts, volleys, and streams, his words slurred, stretched, and compressed as he channels his heroes and roasts his enemies. His references are personal and evocative. “BBW” is named after the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (JPEG claims to be his black counterpart). On “Post Verified Lifestyle,” he likens himself to DOOM, Beanie Sigel, the Beatles, and 98 Degrees. The first half of “Rap Grow Old and Die x No Child Left Behind” uses Bobby Brown and Michael Jackson to skewer music industry whitewashing in the chorus, and ends its second verse with a shout out to Tom Hardy’s Bane.

What’s striking about all these name drops is their constant sense of dimension. JPEG threatening to turn former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon into Steve Hawking on “PRONE!” is incredibly brash and aggro and ableist, yes, but it’s also a sincere expression of rage against a propagator of white nationalism. Similarly, JPEG’s reference to The Dark Knight Rises alludes to the album’s title while conveying his genuine belief in armed revolt against cops. As nerdy and gushing as this album is, it’s no less unabashed about JPEG’s political stances. He may want to be your girl (“Thot Tactics”), but he’s still blasting the alt-right (“Beta Male Strategies”) and incensed by police brutality (“PTSD”). There’s no hierarchy to his touchstones or his tactics; his idols coexist with his ideals.

Given the record’s wild song titles and manic energy, it’s tempting to attribute that equivalency to the internet, but JPEG’s fluency feels more tied to his life experiences than his web history. He’s lived across the world and country as an airman, artist, and black man (“I been everywhere around the world and nobody likes niggas,” he once observed). He grew up listening to reggae singer Michael Prophet (“Free the Frail”) and has recorded sincere covers of Carly Rae Jepsen and now TLC (a dissonant cut of “No Scrubs” appears as “BasicBitchTearGas”). “Don’t rely on the strength of my image,” he sings on “Free the Frail.” It feels like a public warning as well as a personal mantra.

In balancing the stridence of his politics with the aesthetic overload of his many influences, All My Heroes reintroduces JPEGMAFIA as an imagineer as well as a provocateur. He remains a hellraiser, but also comes across as bubbly and inventive, technicolor and cyberpunk—real anime supervillain shit. In a scattered .txt file titled “thoughts” included with his previous album Veteran, he wrote, “U can never make a type beat for me I’m to [sic] varied.” Back then, the statement rang true mostly for his boisterous, glitchy beat-making. All My Heroes shows that it applies to his full skill set. Get this man a shield.