Just after he turned 17, the Baton Rouge emcee YoungBoy Never Broke Again put out 38 Baby, a breakout mixtape that featured direct and local influences Kevin Gates and Boosie BadAzz but set him apart as his own star. He’s spent the last year elegantly traversing this new spotlight—releasing an even more formidable mixtape in August after signing to Atlantic—and living in the aftermath of pleading guilty for aggravated assault earlier this year, a diminished charge from the attempted murder charges initially on his plate.

Released a couple weeks before his 18th birthday, Ain’t Too Long is YoungBoy’s latest mixtape, an eight-track YouTube playlist that continues to upend the fear and survivalism that he carries with him. Despite the occasion to bask in his new stardom, YoungBoy’s legal troubles and his constant anxiety of his hometown’s violence continues to drench his music—the threat of gunfire in both directions seems to dominate his every moment. Even an outright love song like “You the One” has a tinge of paranoia: teenage romance as radical escapism. Of course, sometimes he sounds like a brash instigator himself, shouting out promissory threats on thumping songs like “Red Rum” and “War With Us.” Still, he’s never cold-hearted or detached. YoungBoy runs hot with revenge and remains obsessed with safeguarding his family at home and in the streets.

His music remains a vital coping mechanism in his life. YoungBoy’s raps run the gamut from fast-paced and percussive shouts to an almost metallic croon when the rasp of his voice is touched by AutoTune. He rarely stretches in either direction past his nasal midrange, but Ain’t Too Long finds him a better singer and songwriter than ever before, putting all of this over the bluesy palette of trap beats YoungBoy’s familiar collaborator Dubba-AA has whipped up for him.

The electric guitar and choral “ahhs” of “Pour One” sound dramatically wistful and YoungBoy raps a gutting confessional about his friend-turned-rival and fellow Baton Rouge rapper Gee Money, who was shot and killed last month. Filtered through the recent beef, his nostalgia rots into resentment as he lays out a years-long friendship drama in a few cutting lines: “You did some foul shit and had sex with my sister/Then threw it in my face in front the people on Insta/I ain’t gon’ speak on that disease that y’all gave to each other.” The verse tumbles forward through YoungBoy’s time behind bars, where he hears about his cousin’s death over the phone and is spurred into “getting out”—of jail, of the violence that landed him there—before his street pragmatism sinks him back to earth. It’s a startlingly crystal story of his angst.

“Thug Alibi” is the bookend sitting opposite the blood-curdling opener “Red Rum.” YoungBoy’s final statement takes a reflective turn, floating over a jumpy harpsichord loop slinking into the woozy backdrop of snares and guitar. It’s an apology without remorse. “Mama I’m sorry from the way that I live/Gotta go hard, yeah you know how it is,” he wails on the chorus. Later, he doesn’t shrug off her concern so much as tersely cast it aside. “They steppin’ ma, we steppin’ too.”

There’s a more powerful apology earlier on the mixtape, and it’s not in a chorus or in a verse: “Lord, please forgive me, for all the thing things that I done did.” YoungBoy recites this atonement at the end of “Pour One,” after airing out dirty laundry with as much vulnerability as icy spite. And then he offers a jolting reminder of his age, his voice almost sheepish for the first and last time on the tape. “Mom, I’m sorry for being a bad kid,” he says. When you consider just how much he’s lived and accomplished as a kid, it makes the elegance of his music and survivalism all the more dire and tragic. In a now-deleted post, YoungBoy recently tweeted about his upcoming birthday, writing, “I’m not turning #18 I’m forever #17.” Up to this point in his life, his pain and deaths and fears have been doled out over days and weeks and sustained for all his years. Even at this pivotal, accelerated moment in his career, it makes sense he’d want time to stand still for a little while.