From Eminem sidekick to Dr. Dre ghostwriter, from major-label hit-chaser to backpack powerhouse, from deliriously drunk shit-talker to soberingly woke preacher, Royce 5’9” has played them all. In his 20 years of funneling characters into hip-hop, there’s never been a stretch of track where the Detroit rapper couldn’t outrap anyone around him.

All of which puts Royce beyond a certain type of criticism. He has made great music many times before, but sometimes the issue is everything but the rapping. His last solo album, 2018’s The Book of Ryan, was more inwardly focused, a self-aware autobiography that also functioned as a late-career reckoning. His latest, The Allegory, doesn’t coast on that same goodwill. Instead, Royce looks outward as a heavy-handed attempt at converting his listeners to woke enlightenment. There are plenty of redeeming moments here, but it’s hard to shake some of the straight-faced proselytizing.

The anti-vaccination lines on The Allegory—and there are several—might have been chalked up as trivial goofy-horrorcore lyrics on an old Royce mixtape, but that’s a luxury he abandons here early on, staring into the camera at the beginning of the album to declare: “This is the allegory of the cave theory by Plato, this is the first chapter.” On one hand, you can’t take that seriously; on the other, he’s taking himself seriously—too seriously. Still, Royce wants it both ways. “Present picture: a guy battles sexuality in tight apparel, eyeshadow/That’s not deep, I’m shallow,” he raps on that same introduction. In other words: here’s something vaguely offensive, but I don’t really mean it. Right? Wink. Yikes.

Not everything is this clunky. If anything, the album is so dense that it’s best moments can feel buried. The many guest spots help lighten things up, even when they’re grimy. On “FUBU,” Conway the Machine shit-talk sounds breezy over a sinisterly kooky boom-bap beat alongside Royce’s complexity. On “Overcomer” Westside Gunn raps chilling street raps like “Where I’m from driveby’s overrated/If you got five bodies then you famous” that require no decoding. Vince Staples and G Perico inject their own nasally, jumpy energy on “Young World.”

Royce also produced every bit of music on The Allegory, a first for his career. His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid. There a handful of moments on The Allegory of sheer delight where Royce barrels both forcefully and elegantly into a complex rhyme scheme and makes it seem easy.

You’ll have to brush aside some of the missteps (a well-intentioned Eminem skit is a clumsy grappling with white privilege and hip-hop as a Black art), but you’ll hear vulnerable catharsis about his father on songs like “Hero” alongside the more steely lyrical attacks. The best moment on the album might be the most light-hearted, when Royce pokes fun at a career misstep on a song called “Rhinestone Doo Rag.” (He tells his younger listeners they’ll have to Google it.) It’s an exercise in humility from a guy often pointing a finger and seriously overexplaining. It’s funny and lands better when he’s the butt of the joke. Plus, he’s rapping his ass off.