We know now that this was the fulcrum. The breaking point between Pop Star and Monster, the gruesome final rip of provisional sutures. The moment Future became something else—an oracle, or Faustian agent of temptation, or something else that sounds fucking absurd until you hear "Codeine Crazy" wasted at 3 a.m. But who was really ready for Monster, the first of Future’s trilogy of career-resuscitating mixtapes, when it dropped a year ago today? I think a lot of us weren’t. It was a strange time to be a Future fan: there was the fresh corpse of "Body Party", the deeply pathetic "Pussy Overrated". Honest was fine but made you wonder what had happened to its original incarnation Future Hendrix, or to Super Future/Fire Marshal Future for that matter.

This wasn’t music for happy people.

In some ways Monster is a lesser work than the two chapters of the trilogy that would follow. It’s obviously less cohesive than the entirely Zaytoven-produced Beast Mode and the mostly Southside-produced 56 Nights, which inspired a wave of single-producer rap tapes this year. But of course it’s a little incoherent: Monster is Future’s most fucked-up record, aesthetically and existentially. (Listen to "Radical"! The shit is like a Metro Boomin witch house remix of a drunken Gregorian chant about bungee jumping away from your problems.) He stumbles over himself, occasionally onto profundity unlike anything he’d reached before. He contradicts himself, sometimes out of sheer inebriation, sometimes purposeful delusion. Grief is messy like that.

In the Kubler-Ross framework, Monster sees Future slipping from denial to anger. Within the ever-expanding mythology of Nayvadian alter-egos, it falters between his Future Hendrix and Monster personas: the former, detail-fascinated and muse-driven, nudging the latter’s rage-blind id back in check, only to be stifled with Actavis. Often, he is a total dick. But in the unguarded moments between meltdowns and benders, there is the kind of staggering clarity that comes in the calm right after you just say "fuck it." It’s an unflinching tour of the human psyche at its most grotesque and vulnerable. Trap music as Hieronymous Bosch hellscape. I don’t know if it’s the best of the mixtape trilogy, but it’s the most important.

The exact moment everything changes is the 2:10 mark of "Throw Away". First two minutes, pure performative douchery. "Girl you know you like a pistol, you a throw away." Sure, bro. And then the beat changes—can we talk about this beat? This joyless dirge from Nard & B, the guys who once brought you Future’s giddiest pop songs?—and then: "I know your true feelings ain’t… They couldn’t be here, you hear me? They gotta be somewhere else." And then he unravels. He had a threesome and all he could see was Ciara. He has to know if she thinks about him when she’s fucking "him". If she’s happy. "Now: do you feel better about yourself?" He’s talking to Ciara, but he’s talking to himself, too. Was any of this even worth it? The falsetto’s out now. He’s acting pathetic, straight up begging, then backtracking, but it’s too late. Everything’s blurry on Monster, anyway: there’s so much bleed-over between rage and sorrow that it’s pointless to try and map where "good" ends and "bad" begins. It’s not that the avant-garde needn’t be moral. It’s that morality doesn’t exist in hell.

Monster isn’t flawless, but it’s filled with moments of brilliance: the eventual smash "Fuck Up Some Commas"; Metro Boomin’s demonic flute on the title track’s hook, and his echoing woodblocks on "Mad Luv"; Future’s voice cracking on "My Savages", a love letter to his old life; "Hardly", a song about memory as arch nemesis over an 808 Mafia re-imagining of "My Heart Will Go On". But really, it’s all leading up to "Codeine Crazy", the most emotionally transparent Future has ever been, and ever will be, on record. (And his best video of all time, and probably the best music video ever made.) Why did we initially focus on petty lines about taking a girl to Chipotle while he was howling his addictions to whoever was still listening? When he passed out in the champagne room, alone, singing about suicide? When he was dancing in front of his friend’s grave dressed in bone-white, clutching a double cup in a barren field—the future and the past frozen in nihilist purgatory? "I’m taking everything that come with these millions," he cries, the rotten entrails of a rap boast. It’s the rawest, most beautiful rap song of 2014, and I didn’t realize it until months later. Yams knew.

We are neck-deep in the "Classic or Trash" age of cultural discourse, which has understandably turned us all into raging skeptics. Migos are better than the Beatles, Taylor Swift’s business acumen contains the full scope of pop music ontology, Drake exists nowhere between Benevolent Savior and Evil Incarnate. So when people roll their eyes at the zealous devotion of the self-proclaimed #FutureHive that has amassed in Monster’s wake over the past year, I get it. But it’s real. I don’t know how to tell you, but I can feel it. And Monster still holds all the secrets.