It would be difficult to catalogue all of Dean Blunt’s schemes since 2009, when he released his earliest avant-garde EPs as part of the duo Hype Williams. The fringe U.K. vocalist and producer has typically left bewildered fans on their own to make sense of the scattershot allusions, subversions, and red herrings that litter his work. In 2015, he published a book called “Cîroc Boyz,” featuring scans of exorbitant night-club tabs collected from bars around the world; earlier that year, he sent an anonymous stand-in to accept a trophy in his place at the NME Awards; and, at his most recent New York concert, in March, he forced media guests to check in under aliases that they’d received with their ticket confirmations.

These tactics are effective—obfuscation often attracts attention—but such campaigns beg for a worthy cause. Until now, Blunt may have been taking the piss, grinning into infamy. But on his latest release, “BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow,” credited to a trio called Babyfather, he nods more accessibly toward the ironies of black Britain, mining immigrant iconography and American rap tropes to toy with these diasporic symbols.

“Who’s from Jamaica, though? Who’s from Ghana, Nigeria and all that?” DJ Escrow asks halfway through the patchwork-style “BBF.” Blunt is from Hackney; his parents are Nigerian. His experience seeing rough East London roads give way to hip art scenes informs his output—the sounds on his albums shift between hissy lovers’ rock, dub, sinuous guitar, and melodic, ambient compositions. “BBF” is Blunt’s most pronounced turn toward hip-hop, coinciding with a swell of global interest in U.K. rap and grime. Across the twenty-three tracks, the artist seems both critical and protective of his city’s street music, subtly reminding his peers that subcultures wane once they cross over into caricature. Some fans have speculated, inaccurately, that Escrow is just another one of Blunt’s personas: his slang-laden interludes border on a satire of the typical London rude boy, and at moments his ruminations are particularly timely. Quoting from the Cormega album “The Realness” —a fairly deep cut—Escrow asks, “Everybody’s your man when things is going right, but what about when things are going wrong?”

Blunt stages his “BBF” project in the Panther Room at Output on Sept. 14. It’s a risky ticket—at his show in March, the venue’s thermostat was set to eighty degrees. Whether or not his agenda is worth the agitation, Blunt is certainly engrossing to watch, if you can see him through the fog. “I make sure the place is too smoky for me to even feel anyone else being there,” he explained recently. “And so I can smoke.” ♦