Danny Brown would describe himself as patient when it comes to creating music. Others—specifically those who've worked closely with the Detroit rapper over the past five years and have witnessed him establish himself as one of the weirdest, most outré, and undeniably innovative voices in hip-hop—liken his creative process to something better resembling isolationism. To that end, Brown's closest friends and business partners might not hear from the rapper for several months at a time. But they never worry: When Danny Brown is in album-creation mode—that long-gestating time period wherein every night, at approximately 10 p.m., he'll start sifting through beats, writing lines, maybe laying down vocals—they know he's not to be disturbed. As A-Trak, co-founder of Fool's Gold Records, who signed Brown in early-2011 and shortly thereafter released his groundbreaking mixtape, XXX, told me: "Sometimes you just gotta help Danny be comfortable so he can go into isolation and create."

But what happens when Brown secludes himself in the northern Detroit suburb of Farmington, as he did for a majority of the past three years, and inspiration never strikes? If you're Danny Brown—the gap-toothed goofball who rapped for street-corner drug dealers walking home from high school so they wouldn't give him shit, the man whose squealing voice and unorthodox beats have upended hip-hop—you simply call up your childhood hero and ask for advice.

"I had a sit-down with Nas," Brown tells me rather nonchalantly one afternoon, lounging backstage on a black leather couch at Chicago's House of Blues before a show that evening, wearing a grey sweatshirt, trendy black leather pants with zippers all over them, white-and-red Air Jordan's on his feet. Brown, as you might expect from someone who has been dropping mixtapes and spitting rhymes since Kindergarten show-and-tell, is rarely at a loss for words. Still, he'd spent months sifting through hundreds of beats sent to him from go-to producer, Paul White, unable to find lyrical inspiration for his next project. "My main question to him was, 'After all these albums, how do you still have stuff to rap about?'" he recalls asking Nas. The New York rap icon, like any good mentor, was direct and pointed in his response. "Just rap!" he told Brown. "Stop thinking about everything else and go with the actual thing that got you here. Sit there and fucking do the work."

"Just rap!" Nas told Danny Brown. "Stop thinking about everything else and go with the actual thing that got you here. Sit there and fucking do the work."

Brown lets out a childlike chuckle, his silver diamond grill glistening with every gawky smile he flashes. In a world where seemingly everyone reaffirms that you, Danny Brown, are a supposed genius, a man whose energy level and creative well isn't ever supposed to stagnate, it's refreshing on occasion to be snapped back to reality. "Put the beat on and let the fucking shit happen," Nas instructed him. "Something is going to happen."

What happened is Brown's new album, Atrocity Exhibition, which he released a few days early this week from its scheduled September 30 drop. It's named after a Joy Division song and a J.G. Ballard book, and yet is more fierce and harder hitting than most of the trap music valued amongst the "super woke."

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Brown views his albums as snapshots of his life. He likes to say he's "narrating time-capsules." Here's what one would assume Brown's latest time capsule represents: An artist who's become a major festival anchor; a rapper covered by every respectable music outlet; a talent who attracts the biggest names in rap (Kendrick Lamar and Earl Sweatshirt guest on the spectacular Atrocity Exhibition posse-cut "Really Doe"); a man living the hip-hop dream. This isn't what Brown writes about, though. Atrocity Exhibition, it turns out, is a snapshot not of the present, but of that moment after XXX, when the world started really paying attention to Danny Brown, and the subsequent pressures and expectations began building upon him. "Everybody saying, 'You got a lot to be proud of' / Been high this whole time / don't realize what I done," Brown raps on the album's opening track "Downward Spiral." While XXX was in large part a dissection of a drug-addled star-in-the-making ("Blunt after blunt after blunt after blunt after blunt after blunt" might as well have been the theme to that era), a depressed man nearing 30 who'd been grinding for years, 2013's Old, by comparison, was something of a rejoinder—a self-admitted push towards pop and an embrace of festival-ready EDM.

His latest, by contrast, is his darkest and most psych-rock effort yet. Atrocity Exhibition is a punishing, warped dissection of an ascendant rapper confronting his demons. It depicts a guy at a personal crossroads, unsure whether the wild-and-wacky party-time self-caricature he'd created of himself, and the live shows he hosted with the manic energy of hardcore DIY gatherings, was in fact the real him.

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Ask him how one deals with this inner conflict, how Brown decides what types of songs and persona to put out into the world, and his assessment is a simple one. "It's all about what Daniel is satisfied with," he says referencing his adolescent self, the one who told people he was going to be a rapper from Day One. "That 12-year-old kid that was in his bedroom with a tape rewinding it and just vibing out in front of the speaker with his eyes closed. I make my albums for him. Because Daniel was a fan of Danny Brown way before any other fan was."

Brown's collaborators more than anything marvel at his knowing himself, his knack of where exactly to push himself creatively and uninhibited willingness to take sonic risks. U.K. musician-producer Paul White, who began working with Brown circa XXX and has credits on over half of Atrocity Exhibition, felt an instant kinship with Brown. "I consider my beats really crazy and hard to rap on, but Danny was just always willing to pick the experimental stuff, the crazy stuff," White tells me, specifically referencing Atrocity Exhibition's "Tell Me What I Don't Know." "Danny had a totally open mind to doing something different," he says. "From the start it was obvious he was going for his own direction rather than some cool thing already going on." The track is a bruising tale of home-spun tragedy over rumbling percussion.

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"Every album of his shows you a new mission statement, an artistic state of mind, a sort of manifesto," A-Trak offers. "Each of his albums represents an artistic choice that he commits to for that album. All he needs is just that little blanket of comfort and confidence… and then you see him spread his wings and express himself as weirdly and artistically as he wants to."

Brown says such self-awareness is more a testament to his perseverance than anything. "Just like anything else that took time growing with your music," he says. "That took professionalism. A lot of times it's knowing who yourself is as an artist. And as a person in general. And that just takes aging."

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As far as Brown is concerned, there was never a time he didn't consider himself a rapper. After his cousin babysat him and introduced him to LL Cool J's Radio, the young boy born Daniel Sewell in West Detroit was hooked. "When you go to school and they ask you what you want to be when you grow up, I always said 'rapper,' and the class would laugh," he remembers. "But I bet now if you said that the whole class would say they wanted to be one." Brown refutes the idea that he's "gangster" in any way, but when your uncle runs a major drug-dealing game in town and your high school friends start slinging, it's hard to escape the allure of easy money. So even as he was dreaming of making a life as a rapper, Brown sold drugs for a time. When he got arrested at age 19—and was subsequently thrown in jail for eight months for violating probation stemming from a previous arrest for distribution and manufacturing and possession with intent to distribute—it was his inability to listen to music behind bars that really got to him. "That was the worst experience of my life," he tells me. "Not necessarily me being locked up or that my freedom was gone, but that I couldn't pick the music that I wanted to listen to. That hurt more than anything. I used to have my brother mail me MF Doom lyrics just so I could have something."

Once out he turned his attention fully to rap. After a brief stint in the group Rese'vor Dogs on 50 Cent's G-Unit Records—he was ultimately told he was too bizarre for their image—he began getting contacted by A&R's at record labels in New York City. Soon he was grabbing a Greyhound bus to NYC every weekend, riding the nine-plus hours to take meetings at places like Roc-A-Fella Records with "just enough money for Metro cards and a slice a day." Most of those weekends were spent sleeping on studio floors "and as long as you can and record a song and leave with a whole mixtape every weekend you're gold." Longtime friend and collaborator, Detroit hip-hop luminary and "Really Doe" producer Black Milk recalls meeting Brown around this time. The rapper first came through Milk's studio when working on his 2010 album, The Hybrid. "I thought he was different than most Detroit rappers at that time: his delivery and his voice and his flow," Milk recalls. "It's the individuality. It's hard to find that in rap music and in music in general."

Where Brown's individuality may have turned off G-Unit, it instantly attracted A-Trak and Fool's Gold. A-Trak recalls watching early videos of Brown and being struck by the rapper's individuality. "He had corn rows and was wearing football jerseys, but there was already something off and interesting about him," he says. By the time they met two weeks later, when Brown was opening for Das Racist, the label had told Brown they wanted to sign him. A-Trak says Brown had fully transformed into the bizzaro idiosyncratic cult-hero of today. "He had shaved half of his head and was wearing a dashiki and the tightest jeans I had ever seen," A-Trak recalls with a laugh. "He'd fully shed his skin. He had turned into Danny Brown."

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Brown doesn't fully refute the typical hip-hop narrative that the music saved his life–many of his drug-dealing friends are either dead or in jail—but ask him what he'd be doing if not one of the most beloved and overanalyzed rappers out there and he's quick to clarify he'd still be living a life surrounded by music. "I might not necessarily have wound up being that rapper I wanted to be but I would have found a job in the music business," he says. "I would be happy at this point in my life just working a nine-to-five and still trying to figure out how to get into the music industry. Even if it was just working in an office. Or I could have just worked in a vinyl store. That would have been good enough with me."

Brown takes what he does seriously, obsesses over his albums and his live shows not least because he doesn't want to lose what he's earned. "I have to view it as a job," he says he says of his still-burgeoning career. "But at the end of the day, the love of the music is what keeps me going more so than the financial gain. Rapping was my hobby. So once your hobby becomes your job, it'll become your job if you don't let it be fun for you." He slowly stands up, stretches, and prepares to head out to work for a venue packed with Chicago fans. "If all you'll trying to do is make music to satisfy your bank account then it'll be boring. I make music to satisfy my soul."