After breaking through a year ago with Drip Season 3, Gunna has quickly become a certified rap star, peaking with an album alongside fellow rising local and like-minded droner Lil Baby called Drip Harder. Following a somewhat limited start, he eventually broke new ground with a near-perfect trifecta: a show-stealing spot on Travis Scott’s Astroworld (“Yosemite”), the Lil Baby tag-teamer “Drip Too Hard,” and the Metro Boomin-produced aerodynamic study “Space Cadet,” all songs that advanced his writing, his execution, or his range. Drip or Drown 2 does not further the strides taken on those songs but retreats back toward the center of his sound. And yet it is still the best Gunna solo effort to date, owed primarily to his pronounced understanding of what the average Gunna song does well and how exactly to replicate those same effects.

Gunna is what an inhibited Young Thug might sound like. A protege of the eccentric 300 rapper signed to his YSL imprint and deeply indebted to him stylistically, Gunna raps like his mentor is very tired. There’s a monotonic quality to his performances, in tune and intensity, even as his flows twist and turn. If Thug’s method is astral projection, one impulsive out-of-body experience after another, Gunna’s is closer to lucid dreaming. His sequences seem to have no beginnings or ends, no entry points, with hooks segueing into verses and vice versa, a string of perpetual non sequiturs (“I lied at the precinct/I didn’t sign a 360”) that can range from the completely random (buying pants for Young Thug in Japan that cost more than he made at his show) to the personal (riding in a plushed-out Benz feeling like the world was in his hands). He never seems to punch in. He is amid an endless transition.

Their complementary styles overlap on “3 Headed Snake,” where the pair is constantly switching places over Wheezy production, with Gunna naturally following Thug’s lead. But there are moments when Thug pops out of the mix—“Jeepers creepers, the gators got measles, shit!/I fucked up the bank, bought a rose gold shank,” he yowls at one point—demonstrating a very obvious distance between them. The same predisposition that makes Gunna dependable makes him predictable, and it is holding him back.

Gunna has a very clear and obvious wheelhouse he’s reluctant to stray from, perhaps because it has led him directly to a Top 5 first sales week and a platinum single. In lieu of outward travel, then, he has opted to go deeper. These cuts take standard Gunna formats and reinforce them, reimagining several of his best songs in the process. “Richard Millie Plain” nearly transposes “Sold Out Dates,” but these flows lurch forth. “On a Mountain” flips “Oh Okay,” his whack-a-mole routine with Thug and Baby, and stretches out the melodies. Across the entire album, he is polishing his well-established Gunna maneuvers.

His bars vary from the goofy (“She made me bust a nut, that’s a starburst”) to the confusingly profound (“Time is poured on me when I ride that Maybach”), but it’s his ability to apply his signature inflection to just about any rhythm he conjures up that can make Drip or Drown 2 nearly hypnotizing. Be it the closed-loop chants of “Wit It” and “Same Yung Nigga” or the clipped chirps of “Speed It Up,” Gunna has an uncanny feel for settling his mellowed croons into the thick of any beat; here produced primarily by Wheezy and Turbo, that means bending in and out of shape with washed-out guitar riffs (“Yao Ming”), flickering synths (“Derrick Fisher”), and guzheng plucks (“Who You Foolin”). Occasionally, things all come together for Gunna, when the tune-fueled run-on sentences generate sudden, seeming out-of-the-ether observations that flatter him, as on “IDK Why”: “I don’t work for free/The salesmen that know me in Barney’s say I smell like Biscotti mixed with Creed,” he raps, slipping in an arbitrary but memorable detail that shows some personality. There are just enough of these moments on Drip or Drown 2 to distract from the fact Gunna has yet to take a real, meaningful risk.