There’s this story in *The New York Times Magazine *where the writer asks his subject, Jerry Seinfeld, why he still spends months on the road. The comedian, worth nearly a billion dollars, could retire with his family to a private beach somewhere; if he wanted to chase some grand artistic dreams, he could surely land an unlimited budget from any number of movie studios. Instead he tinkers away in theatres, dark clubs, and at tiny private gigs, making minor variations on jokes that sometimes take years to perfect. “The smaller something is, the harder it is to make,” Seinfeld said, gushing over the careful click of a closing door from one of the “few dozen” Porsches he owns. He’s drawn to the arts that require precision, he explained, like calligraphy—“or samurai.”

Halfway through his brief, brilliant new album, Ka sneers: “How many cars you need?” With *Honor Killed the Samurai, *the Brownsville craftsman cements himself as one of this generation’s preeminent stylists, his voice hushed but vicious, his production a grim rabbit hole of found sounds, minor keys, and very few drums. Beginning in earnest with 2012’s Grief Pedigree, Ka has peeled away every extraneous layer from his work, tinkering like the Porsche designer until each part fits within another just so. Now he’s arrived at its core, where each syllable is purposeful and every piano key is in its right place.

And yet the genius of Ka’s music is that the form follows function. On “$,” the song where he questions how many cars one man can drive, he also raps: “Watch me blueprint rec centers/I’m trying to inspire.” So much of his past, his worldview, his creative style is packaged into that one couplet, be it the deserted Brooklyn of his youth, his unerring loyalty, his economy of language. It’s the sort of line that unlocks whole sections of an artist’s psyche for the audience, all in fewer than ten words. As he says earlier on the song, “Could battle hard against catalogs with one leaflet journal.”

The irony of Samurai’s title is that, while the window dressing recalls feudal Japan, you rarely have to look back further than Giuliani’s New York to see the kinds of fiercely fought, morally fraught battles that rage in the background. By now, Ka’s story is well-worn—the Golden Age also-ran who walked away then, when the itch came back, locked himself in a bedroom until all the swords were sharp. He was a member of Natural Elements, a group that eventually landed on Tommy Boy but made little impact; when he resurfaced, it was in 2008 with a quietly show-stealing verse on GZA’s Pro Tools. He’s not a revivalist—in his time away he blended fury and control in a way that would be nearly unrecognizable in any era—and so his writing has an irresistibly fuzzy relationship to time.

See the passage on “That Cold and Lonely” where he raps, “With no clear winner, still appeared thinner/Don’t howl like I’m holier than thou, I’m a mere sinner/Wasn’t blessed to be resting in the ‘burbs/I was stressing, wrestling with the scourge.” That could be an origin story or a sad denouement; either way, he “tried years for these ideas to gestate.” On “Finer Things/Tamahagene,” the vocal layering is both well suited to fill out the mix and mimics someone’s own paranoid self-doubt. But more importantly, Ka wrings his hands over fulfilling his vast potential: “They say it’s royal in my blood*.*”

In the first verse of “Mourn at Night,” Ka says, simply, “My scars last.” That might be the best way to put it. Even setting aside the obvious detour his creative life took, the man’s work is littered with past moments of trauma that have, by this point, settled into his bones. The hours spent making himself one of genre’s greatest songwriters, the dollars lost to broken security deposits—they all add up to a life made for viewing through all the grimy, shattered lenses Ka has at his disposal. Because no matter how the borough shifts around him, he’s somewhere in a dark room, working and re-working the details until he gets it just right.