It's easy to write G-Eazy off as a Macklemore that simply grew up further south: He's a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable fan base producing the same kind of sober wordplay, one that carefully articulates individual syllables and slots them into grooves, expressing thoughts in straight lines. Each artist has taken each painstaking step to address his whiteness (and subsequently how that makes them outliers and commodities all at once) and they both present themselves as very for the culture, a phrase which here means aligned with conservative rap values and in tune with hip-hop culture's history and innermost workings. But upon closer examination, G-Eazy isn't much like Macklemore at all; in fact, he's more like Bizarro Macklemore, a self-serious, self-absorbed swag rapper who shuns the thrifty for the bourgeois.

His debut album, 2014's These Things Happen, articulated this identity through the prism of the sounds of the moment: mostly the sadness of Drake and somberness of Kendrick Lamar. It was a decent first offering, but the music had no pulse: It was carefully dressed mannequin rap, standing stiff without feeling. His sophomore effort When It's Dark Out makes a lot of the same mistakes: This is a deliberately serious record that refuses to play to his strength, a sharply turning flow that pivots on his buoyant pronunciations, which are naturally comical. Instead, it opts to move cautiously and without jest. It's fitting that one of the singles is titled "Sad Boy" because that's the plainest way to express the basic idea of this record: Even something as cool as being famous can be humorless and miserable.

Rapping and being a rapper often feel like chores for G-Eazy, and it can be a chore to listen to him. There's a certain earnestness to his writing, which focuses in on the things he wants—whether that's a Ferrari, a Grammy, or just for his grandmother to stay in her old home—and he's a very capable lyricist. But when he raps, "And fuck it, I'm the coldest white rapper in the game since the one with the bleached hair," on "Calm Down" it somehow feels less like a boast and more like an admission of a shallow field. When he's sharing space with someone as engaging as E-40, the holes really start to show.

When It's Dark Out is a marked sonic improvement from his debut. The majority of These Things Happen was produced by frequent collaborator Christoph Andersson and G-Eazy himself, and it dragged throughout. Though they do share production credits on "Sad Boy", "Some Kind of Drug", and "Think About You", the beats come primarily from an ensemble cast highlighted by 808 Mafia co-founder Southside, Boi-1da, and DJ Dahi. There are productions from electronic producer Cashmere Cat, longtime Future cohorts Nard & B, and rap radio regulars KeY Wane and Kane Beatz. This all seems like a conscious effort on G-Eazy's part to flesh out his sound into something more dynamic and less one-note, and there are effective tonal shifts, especially the Kehlani-featuring "Everything Will Be OK".

G-Eazy is at his best when he steps out of the shadows and raps assuredly, and there are signs of that on When It's Dark Out. On "Random", he asserts that his surprise indie success isn't the result of some lucky breaks but a byproduct of hard work. ("What If" posits an interesting counter theory before coming to the same conclusion: "What if the game didn't care I was white/ Would I still be selling out shows every night/ Would they all believe in the hype/ Regardless of image/ I'm askin' would people still love me despite/ I'd still be right here in these shoes cuz I fit 'em, I worked for this life.") The Big Sean-assisted "One of Them" boasts one of his more elastic flows. He gets his closest to passing off his Sad Boy aesthetic on "Don't Let Me Go", which pairs Nard & B up with KeY Wane for a clattering beat that flattens a drowsy vocal sample into a sprawling canvas. "Troubled mind of an artist/ But the star comes alive in the darkness," he raps, as if to justify his status. It's one of the few moments that give any credence to his burgeoning base.