Cashmere arrives in another era of heightened Islamophobia both in the U.S. and in Britain, but its humor feels different. There’s an underlying urgency behind all the jokes, a sense that the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, but while the satire is grounded in the political moment, Swet Shop Boys also sound like they’re having fun. Heems and Riz’s divergent cultural upbringings—Heems is a first-generation American born in New York to Hindu-Punjabi parents from India while Riz was raised by Pakistani immigrant parents in the suburbs of London—afford them common ground on which both rappers are able to draw on the familiarity of shared experiences to tackle issues of racism and tokenization.

Like airports. Or, specifically, the experience of going through international borders as young men of South Asian descent. On “T5,” the opening track on Cashmere, Swet Shop Boys tackle racial profiling with a nonchalance that feels both deliberate and poignant, while a shehnai, a wind instrument, sounds off in the background. “Oh no we’re in trouble,” the duo raps, “TSA always wanna burst my bubble / Always get a random check when I rock the stubble.” The tightly-wound, minimally-percussive “No Fly List” picks up where “T5” leaves off, with Heems’s refrain echoing an unfortunate paradox over a rumbling synth: “Like I’m so fly bitch / But I’m on a no-fly list.” On “Shoes Off,” Riz raps over an airy synth line and muffled kick drum about the irony of being detained and interrogated at a London airport days after winning an award at the Berlin Film Festival for portraying an accused jihadist in The Road to Guantanamo.

On Cashmere, airports become transitional spaces where identity is threatened and people of color are constantly forced to justify their presence on Western soil. As first-gens, Riz and Heems have dwelt in these in-between spaces their whole lives. Their approach to dealing with the absurdity of racial profiling is to turn around and laugh at it; they understand how their humor acts not only as a means of protest but also as a way of providing comfort in a shared experience.

On many tracks the jokes are less heavy, although no less sharp, particularly when they skewer cultural appropriation. The largely white, Westernized Hare Krishna sect of Hindus is a particular focus: On the pounding party-anthem “Zayn Malik,” named for the sole Muslim member of the boy band One Direction, Riz paints an elaborate picture of forcing a ponytail onto the head of a skinhead to turn him into a devotee, while Heems describes feeling more out of place in a crowd than a brown guy would at a Hare Krishna temple. Later, he calls out the double standard in popular culture’s commercial attraction to the aesthetics of the Indian lifestyle, but not to its people or history, calling it “Hinduism in the bottle / Marketed and sold like fairness cream by the model.”