It's dicey to try and recapture the spark of a triumph more than ten years past, especially when that particular spark hit at the halfway mark of an already-long career that had reached a major and necessary reinvention point. But here's the funny thing about the rejuvenation efforts Del the Funky Homosapien's undergone over the past six months: after turning in a weary, muddled-sounding, much-belated sequel to his highly revered Deltron 3030 guise, he just popped up and abruptly dropped a no-hype free release that's easily the most consistently satisfying thing he's done since 2000. And it's in a sort of permutation of his style that evokes that very same 2000—not the towering concept-record ambition of Deltron, but a compact reprise of the mocking, unpredictable endorphin rush of Both Sides of the Brain. “Lyrically ill but fun to listen to, nothing super heavy,” he describes Iller Than Most on that Soundcloud page. It's a bit of an understatement.

For one thing, Iller Than Most is off-the-hinges ridiculous. If your follow-up question to that description is “ridiculous good or ridiculous goofy?” the answer is a straight-up “yes”: Del in peak cartoon taunt mode is all kinds of preposterous, dedicated as much to twisting his own voice into grotesque yet charismatic caricatures of itself as he is to talking smack in more traditional cadence. (Think less “late-period Eminem” and more “peak E-40"). That approach pays off early with the opening one-two of “Leader” and “Boogieman", where he respectively goes Russell-Crowe-berserk on some ripoff artists and warns oblivious crumbsnatchers to check under their beds. It's like inverted horrorcore, serial-asskicker/supernatural-force rhetoric wrung inside-out to wiseass effect.

And here's another lure for you: Del's production style alone is worth the price of admission (or it would be if there was any admission). For someone who came up on his lyrical reputation, he's also musically minded enough to pull off immediate hooks and find a way to make the one jump out on even the more left-field beats. Tracks range from simple-enough hard-knock minimalism laced with laser-ricochet drums (“Delta Time”, “Militant”) to clanky, shoulder-disjointing squalls (“Robust”, “Bitin' Ain't Samplin'”) that should have fans asking him what his favorite Death Grips track is. The last moments of closer “Land of Immediate Rap Hits” is a blast of gargling decay that makes the ideal playlist segue into your track of choice from Government Plates.

For the most part, Iller Than Most is good old-fashioned self-big-up material, though it's not entirely fair to call something old-fashioned if it's done in a style without much precedent outside Del's corner of the Bay. As one-note as it gets to hear him go on and on about his underground realness (“Robust”) and mano y mano mic scraps (“10 Paces”) and mental fitness (“Mental Fitness”), it's still impressive how he's still found ways to make those lines stand out more than twenty years after his sophomore album. The monomaniacal rap-battler tunnelvision that fueled 93's No Need for Alarm is the lyrical mode of choice here to seep into the Both Sides vibe, but with the abrupt rubber-voiced u-turns and cranky ad-libs, it's too fun to feel like being buried under a pile of recycled wolf tickets.