In the crowded and competitive world of UK rap, Octavian Godji is doing everything he can to stand out. The 23-year-old South Londoner arrived on the scene with a gripping backstory: He left France for Britain at an early age, attended the prestigious BRIT School, endured homelessness at age 15, and slipped into drug dealing. But it was last year’s debut mixtape Spaceman—an elegant suite of woozy beats, deft poetics, open-book confessionals, and the spirit of Noah “40” Shebib—that lifted him out of the pack. Follow-up Endorphins goes in a new direction—or rather several. Octavian is having fun, pulling at different stylistic threads to see what’s at the other end. And with high-profile guests matched by a crisp collection of beats, Endorphins feels more like a major studio debut than the mixtape it’s billed as.

How diverse is this set? Well, consider the following: Octavian doing a dead-on 21 Savage impression alongside Skepta on the creeping “Bet”; matching A$AP Ferg’s boasts on a track called “Lit”; enlisting Abra for the Lil Peep pastiche “My Head”; underpinning the Theophilus London-featuring dancefloor jam “Feel It” with 1980s-style pop drums; linking up with Jessie Ware amid the thumping drum machines and grinding synths of “Walking Alone.” Yet these swerves rarely feel jarring. With forceful presence, Octavian establishes himself everywhere he goes and never sounds out of his depth.

While Spaceman’s downtempo ambience was punctuated by flashes of naked fragility, this new tape finds Octavian—deploying slang originating everywhere from London to Lawrenceville—mostly interested in drugs, money, and girls. Opening track “Gangster Love” is an ultralight beam of gospel choirs, piano chords, and half-rapped croons doused in Auto-Tune. Except Octavian isn’t reaching for a higher power, unless you consider hooking up a holy moment. “Skrrt away from them man like a ’Rari,” he wills a potential sweetheart from the other side of the room. The unlikely combination of music and lyrics works, if only for its audacity.

Still, there can be a captivating precision to Octavian’s performance. “Molly Go Down” plays like a druggy lurch around an empty house at 4 a.m., slowing time as he slurs out lines like, “I take molly to slow down.” It’s in these instances that Octavian shows his voice—raspy, heavily accented—to be his most potent weapon.

Some missteps remain. The tail end of “Walking Alone,” where he croons formlessly over an electric guitar, could have been nixed. The light dancehall beat of “World” is too translucent to leave much of an impression. But there’s enough here to affirm what we already knew: Octavian has carved out his own distinct corner of British rap. On Endorphins, he asserts his artistic flexibility without diluting his natural gifts.