Danny Brown is a sound archivist, compiling offbeat samples from across time and preserving them as the bedrock of his mad scientist take on hip-hop. Since 2011, he has been at the forefront of rap experimentation while remaining uniquely in tune with the genre’s roots, unifying classicists and progressives alike. His 2011 breakthrough, XXX, carried in it his tumultuous past, one riddled with drug use and distribution in his hometown of Detroit. He subsequently became a poster boy for zonked-out party rap, a role often at odds with his reality and his anxieties.

The 35-year-old Brown, a late-bloomer, has had a career paved with misfortunes, arrests, and industry machinations. He spent the first half of his 30s making up for time lost to prisons and label executives in his 20s, rewriting the rules of what it means to have a successful rap career. His new album, Atrocity Exhibition, is meant as a sequel to XXX, a living document of an eventful chapter in his life, with influences ranging from Joy Division, Raekwon, Björk, Talking Heads, and more. He is constantly using different artists, albums, and songs as reference points in his life, as he explains below, recalling the sounds that molded him as a musician and a man, five years at a time.