Oscar Wilde once said, “The man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world.” No wonder: A fast-paced haven for people of all nationalities, races, and faiths, the city itself is a kind of conversation between the four corners of the earth. Newly arriving to the metropolis can be a welcome assault to the senses, one that’s both confusing and exhilarating. For a young producer like Mura Masa (aka Alex Crossan), sponging up London’s global flavors and subcultures is part and parcel of the creative process. “It’s a big, confusing, beautiful thing,” he says of London, “and that’s the motivation behind my album too.” It’s an ambitious undertaking for a 21-year-old white kid to appoint himself the voice of multicultural Britain, but in an era in which terrorist attacks and nationalist populism have tested the UK’s inclusive ideals, drawing inspiration from the city’s diversity is a worthy—if admittedly somewhat precocious—way of expressing its resilient, future-forward spirit.

On his self-produced debut, Crossan works the city’s spidery Tube maps into an exhilarating electronic framework where the conflicting sounds of the modern-day Tower of Babel can harmoniously coexist. His interest in the city’s cartography is literal: “Messy Love” opens the album with the sounds of a city bus and deposits us at the stop for New Park Road, near Brixton. From there, Crossan traverses the various ends of his adopted home while also cruising through the genres that have filled its inhabitants’ headphones for the past few years, from big-beat hip-hop (“Nuggets”) to airhorn-assisted calypso (“Love$ick”) and harp-infused UK garage (“What If I Go?”). Some of his musical tourism is more tongue-in-cheek: He ventures as far as the South Pacific on “1 Night,” which adds a steel-drum melody to a sample from “Tahiti,” a kitschy piece of 1960s exotica by the Italian soundtrack composer Piero Piccioni, and sends Charli XCX bouncing about like a drunken reveler in a tiki bar. With so many high-profile guests along for the ride—including A$AP Rocky, Desiigner, Christine and the Queens, and Damon Albarn—there’s a risk that the album could become a top-heavy exercise in A&R. But Crossan never leans too hard on his hired talent as he pieces together house and hip-hop beats with sounds like marimba, steel pans, and kalimba.

Born an outlier himself, he spent most of his youth making music in a remote bedroom on the very white, insular island of Guernsey (population: 60,000), where the main local industries were finance and tourism and his nearest venue was five hours away by boat. The internet was his way out: He built his reputation on SoundCloud, and low-profile releases like 2014’s Soundtrack to a Death collection and 2015’s Someday Somewhere EP led to a production credit on Stormzy’s Gang Signs & Prayer. Like Disclosure’s Lawrence brothers, who began making music before they even reached clubbing age, Crossan is proof that going to raves isn’t a prerequisite for aspiring to start one. Being cut off only piqued his curiosity for all things electronic.

The first record he ever bought, Gorillaz’ Demon Days, was itself a genreless, guest-heavy hodgepodge, and Crossan’s millennial internet upbringing has similarly inspired him to seek connections across far-flung places. Mura Masa’s best moments arrive when he finds rejuvenating takes on old grooves. Take “NOTHING ELSE!,” a song written the day Prince died: Led by Tennessee transplant Jamie Lidell, it manages to channel both the Black Keys and Hercules and Love Affair. “Firefly” balances a finger-snap house beat with the feather-lite vocals of the East London R&B singer Nao. “helpline” pushes double-time drumming, with the faintest hint of classic punk, into sparkling future-garage territory. And on “Second 2 None,” Christine & the Queens' Héloïse Letissier is her exquisite ice-queen self, yet now over skittering drum ‘n’ bass beats. Coherent in spite of its range, Mura Masa never lets its jam-packed contents overshadow a vision that refuses to be boxed in.

It’s Damon Albarn’s willingness to let Crossan guide him, however, that makes for the most significant track on the record. Having his hero share vocals with him on the slow-paced, lovelorn “Blu” feels like a symbolic passing of the baton in the journey to a music without borders. The song embodies a melancholy that runs throughout Mura Masa—reflecting, perhaps, a sense of exhaustion from the challenges of being young and overwhelmed by the city. It’s a love song, but it’s also about the desire for communication and the need to be understood. Toward its close, a few bars of a cappella singing trail off into silence before the jumbled voices of the city rise in the distance. It sounds a lot like Crossan’s vision of home.