To start with, the Saetia sweatshirt. On the cover of Amity, Nedarb Nagrom is wearing the mythic proto-screamo band’s merch, and their logo is dead center. Someone on their Instagram account posted a screenshot of his cover, saying, “I wonder if he has ever heard of us.” It’s a reasonable ask of a young producer about a band 20 years defunct that rarely played shows to more than 50 people. But for Nedarb, it’s no surprise.

Like Saetia, he’s a foundational act in a style that only had a name after he helped create it: late-2010s emo-rap. But Amity isn’t even an emo-rap album. Emotionally and sonically, it’s all over the place, cohesive insofar that it maps a constellation of strange and unforgettable artists. In fact, Saetia’s lead singer now produces tough Philly techno, and that same spirit is present here, too: guest after guest—and there are a lot of them—these are the new DIY lifers.

“Home on Time,” featuring Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, is a fitting opener. Over the past five years, he and Nedarb have worked together in the inventive collectives THRAXXHOUSE, GOTHBOICLIQUE, and their latest, Misery Club, but this is actually the first song with just the two of them. It’s like they finally got a moment to catch their breath. The song is patient in sound—a hollow, dribbling synth—and its sweet, sad message: “I don’t mean to rush her, but I need to go… I never get home on time.”

A few years ago, Nedarb lived in Pasadena with Lil Peep, GBC member Horse Head, and the singer Brennan Savage. His one-time podcast, “Ned’s Place,” occasionally took place in their house, and it now serves as a bittersweet archive of the mundane roundtables that formed when the guys weren’t making music. In 2014, it was Horse Head’s “Numb,” on which Nedarb sampled the Canadian emo band Silverstein, that arguably first cracked open emo-rap. Today, Horse Head and Brennan Savage do the heavy lifting in that style on the five songs that begin Amity, singing about love and angels in the night.

Then on track six, things go sideways. The producer tag, “Yo Ned, turn that light down a little bit,” which once seemed almost defeatist, starts to land decidedly freaky. The first rapper on “Triflin’,” Lil House Phone, is a longtime collaborator, but the left-of-hyphy sound here ushers in a different kind of debauchery. The Atlanta rapper Father sneaks in the very not-sad, “Shawty get crushed and ate up like Lays,” and the album becomes a kaleidoscope of styles.

Each new guest appearance contributes another distinct vocal texture. Bootychaaain and La Goony Chonga, from Gwallah Gang, both show up, and a drawling Black Kray, one of the first artists to use a Nedarb beat, is as unknowable as ever on “Babygangsoldiers.” Newcomer Big Baby Scumbag shouts about Boosie, and Little Pain, the saddest of rappers, compares himself to Casper. Zubin’s vibrato makes an essential appearance, and so does KirbLaGoop’s alarming squeak. Somehow, Alice Glass fits into this, with an ear-piercing wail on “Eat Me Alive Interlude.” Girl Pusher, the ferocious L.A. dance band, remix that “Interlude” for Amity’s final track, with Nedarb fully handing over the reins.

Even the most commercially successful producer albums have validated eccentrics with a few spots in the lineup. On Amity, the oddballs make up the whole team, with Nedarb their bullheaded coach. For many of these artists, he was one of the first people to spot something different in them, and here he relentlessly pushes them for more, adeptly shifting styles and tempos to suit. The effect is of simultaneous humility and confidence. Recently, Nedarb tweeted that he was now charging $5,000 for a beat. Someone pointed out that that’s Atlanta veteran Zaytoven’s rate, and Nedarb simply replied, “And?”