GoldLink is a 20-year-old rapper with a name that recalls a securities firm (he used be to be Gold Link James, but dropped the surname to avoid any Trinidad James comparisons) and a sound all his own. Brightly colored, hyper, and upbeat, the Virginia native's music draws openly from genres that street rap usually has no time for: bachata, go-go, classic house. When Diddy's Revolt.TV asked him to describe his style, he responded thoughtfully: "Rick James meets Justin Timberlake (*NSYNC days) with Backstreet Boys and a little D12 and Tupac." GoldLink is a unique creature in rap right now and he knows it.

He doesn't have much music to his name yet*—The God Complex*, his debut mixtape, is only 26 minutes and nine tracks long. Prior to that, there were six songs on his Soundcloud. But his sound is distinct and unusual enough to have snagged the attention of local tastemakers: Peter Parker, nighttime DJ at D.C. urban radio station WPGC, named him one of the DMV's artists to watch last year, and several of those early songs of his have surpassed 100k plays on Soundcloud. He's struck a nerve, even if no one knows exactly where that nerve is just yet.

There is a lot of information to parse on The God Complex, all of it happening at once. The BPMs are nearly twice as fast as current street rap allows, and glitzy house synths flutter everywhere. Louie Lastic, one of GoldLink's main collaborators and an architect of the sound that they've dubbed "Future Bounce", handles most of the production here; the resulting sound is wet and lubricious—there is a lot of audible licking and jiggling, both in the lyrics and the music. The Ronnie Foster sample behind A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation" peeks out furtively behind strobe lights and '90s R&B keyboards on "Bedtime Story". A slowed-down playback of Britney Spears' "Toxic" surfaces near the end of "How It's Done". You can imagine Azealia Banks wishing she'd corralled production from this crew.

And yet, GoldLink tramples through the music, his rhymes as hard as a shoulder check. This is one of the most fascinating pieces of GoldLink's sound—he skips through the minefield separating rap's ideas of "hard" and "soft". On "Bedtime Story", he calls out wearers of tight jeans and waves box-cutters at us. On "Hip-Hop (Interlude)" he reminisces about "masturbating to them porno flicks my brother gave me" and "popping guns" at age 11. His voice is high, hyper, and excitable, no one's idea of a tough-guy stereotype, but he keeps one foot firmly planted in street rap and the other in the club, tangling all the music's reference points and intentions like kite strings. The surfaces of his music are slick and slippery, and gaining purchase on what he's doing is like trying to hug a dolphin.

This confusion, and the endorphins it loosens, is presumably why people have been losing their shit about GoldLink. His music doesn't just make you hold two opposing ideas in your mind--it opens twelve tabs in one browser window. On "Planet Paradise", he raps in triple-time, allowing a single pinhole gulp of air to open between "everyday we pray to-" and "God" in the exact same place every time. His mind moves at a thousand miles an hour, as does the music. Nine tracks is more than enough to digest for now.