It's easy to stay hidden in Harvey, Ill. Ty Money is a young street rapper from the gritty suburb to Chicago's south, and his talents transcend his city's bleak profile. Although Harvey is virtually unknown nationally, in Chicagoland, it's known for rappers like the east coast-inspired duo Naughty and Kane—with whom Ty recorded "Sibley Boyz" in 2011. That song showcased Ty's slick, lyrically dense rap style, one reminiscent of the narrative-oriented tradition that propelled T.I. in Atlanta back in the early 2000s. (It may explain why the Grand Hustle CEO was reportedly courting Ty for a deal in 2014.) Ty's latest tape, the gripping Cinco De Money, is his third, and the first to realize a coherent vision, updating his style without sacrificing his strength as one of hip-hop's most talented new writers.

Cinco De Money is a dark and depressing record to be sure, the rapper's brutal assuredness set in stark relief against a canvas of hopelessness. But it is engaging in a way that belies its somber subject matter. The album is an immersive visit to Harvey's Sibley Boulevard, a main strip that takes on mythic connotations in Ty's lyrics, his own Queensbridge projects or Bowen Homes. The music moves in continuous descending circles, a musical Escher drawing, giving a downward pull to everything. Some productions, like the grim vocal sample on "Just Bars", are skittishly somber, while others creak back and forth with the inevitability of a porch swing.

Ty is a lyrical rapper, but his dense thickets of wordplay are more concerned with depicting scenes and telling stories than drawing attention to their own cleverness. In the last few years, there's been a tendency among popular rap artists, particularly in the South and Midwest, to take a hypnotically repetitive rhythmic approach—think Migos, or, more locally, King Louie. On Cinco De Money, Ty meshes his older lyrical style with this punchier delivery. The effect works, somehow—his intricate rapping, dense with euphonic syllables and clever wordplay, is stickier, more urgent than ever before. Unlike the Migos, whose lyrics are often appreciated moment-to-moment, his words tend toward narrative cohesion, a thread of ideas best understood in toto. The effect is like a jagged EKG, in which each pulse is horizontally compressed.

Ty defies easy categorization, which is part of why his new work feels so vital, but also might be part of why he's still mostly undiscovered. He's a rapper's rapper, but not a traditionalist. At a time when so many artists aim for the pure, simple gestures, Ty Money aims for an amalgamation: the confluence of rewind-worthy wordplay ("Couple old shooters, call 'em Robert Horry"), evocative imagery that focuses on the details ("Wipin' down the shotty with a napkin"), and a compelling personal narrative. This is street rap that is as much about the blues as Future's "Trap Niggas", which captures a similar tire-spinning-in-mud futility with very different tools. The album's spark, its magnetism, lies in the balance between the crisp precision and forceful confidence of Ty's rapping and the taut unease of his bars, which suggest a lifetime of existential anxiety.