Blank Face LP (LP)

"Music-wise right now, I suck."

In 2014, Schoolboy Q bluntly described his difficulty staying off lean, and what the drug had done to his art and personal life. He told radio personality Angie Martinez that he'd managed to keep it at arms'-length while recording his major label debut, Oxymoron, but that as soon as the album was done, he'd had something of a relapse.

Listening to the album though, you suspected that Q may have been dabbling before the record was mixed. Lean leads to bloat, and while Oxymoron featured plenty of memorable moments, it had too much empty material to fully capitalize on the promise of the rapper's snarling sophomore album, Habits & Contradictions. Q's enormous personality had been downsized, his sharp edges smoothed, his straight-talking iconoclasm receding into rote gangsterisms. So while Oxymoron was received positively upon release, enthusiasm soon dwindled for the record and for the rapper once thought by many to be the slyer, less-earnest equal of his TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar.

Two years later, Quincy Matthew Hanley says he's no longer addicted. He's lost 30 pounds and with his second album for Interscope, Blank Face, he's returned to the trajectory that had him looking like the yin to Kendrick's yang. Q's unpredictable flow, as likely to morph into a bizarrely appealing sing-song melody as it is to shift to sneering double-time, has returned. With it comes a collection of catchy, urgent gangster rap songs that show the South Central native at his charismatic best, gallows humor and tough talk failing to obscure a humane core.

The new record is loaded with features, a warning sign of scattershot focus on most major label albums. But Q's voice holds the center of nearly every track on Blank Face. Anderson .Paak, rap's scene stealer of the year to date, is compelling as ever on the album's title track, but it's Quincy who grounds the narrative, his spoken-word verses painting a past on Hoover Street and a future with the daughter he refers to as both a munchkin and a queen. Kanye West and Vince Staples, two of the biggest personalities in hip-hop, trade bars with Q without overshadowing him, and the songs on which they're featured, "That Part" and "Ride Out," are standouts that nonetheless fit seamlessly into the course of the record as a whole. (Miguel is the only exception to the rule of polite guests: His smooth hook and Q's sandpaper verses repel each other on the late-album misfire, "Overtime.")

We're accustomed to seeing concept albums from TDE, but Blank Face strays from the polemic, reaching instead for portraiture. Q's verses are built from concrete details and raw emotion, and his flexibility is such that he's able to channel two seemingly conflicting emotions into a single verse. His bitterness will be palpable, one moment; in the next, pride shines through. "Guess I'm being a real n**** like I'm 'pposed to be," he raps on "Lord Have Mercy. "But being real never once brought the groceries." Then, in the span of a couple bars: "Hope was all that I needed/dreaming myself to work. The working affair was better than bullet holes in my shirt."

Tracks like "Groovy Tony/Eddie Kane," which was produced in part by TDE producer and frequent Q collaborator, Tae Beast, signal a return to the collective's house sound. Blank Face turns away from the ambitious fusion of To Pimp a Butterfly, instead doubling down on a smoked-out atmosphere that points the listener's focus toward rapping. That puts the onus on Q to hold attention for the duration of the record's hour-plus running time, and he does so with a wide array of tricks, lacing his bars with tone and tempo shifts, a melodicism reminiscent of a young 50 Cent, and ad-libs worthy of Jadakiss, whose signature growling delivery and descriptions of Tony Soprano-esque nihilism provide a thrill on the back half of the track (the first part of which was released as a single without Jada in April.")

Schoolboy Q's resemblance to those stars-both of whom flamed out to some degree as the commercial and creative center shifted away from gangster rap-is natural. Unlike Drake, or Future and Young Thug, Q's music doesn't represent a definitive break with the past. Instead, he symbolizes something of a road not taken, a gangster rapper with the personality and pop instincts to translate an antiquated genre for younger listeners, something like YG's work with DJ Mustard. Q's early hits, "Hands on the Wheel" and "There He Go," were classic rap songs with pop appeal, and Q continues to ably tread that tightrope on Blank Face, with tracks like the E-40 feature "Dope Dealer" and "Whateva U Want," which somehow makes a trance beat work.

But it's Q's reemergence as a distinctive voice that makes Blank Face so welcome. Quincy isn't the preaching type, but he's a careful observer both of his own tendencies and those of the world he occupies. Bluster and braggadocio are traditions in rap, but while Q spews plenty of both, he also has a penchant for telling it like it is. In our current political moment, that makes some of the songs on Blank Face particularly unforgettable. "Black Thoughts" features some of the most moving production from TDE familiar Willie B, as Schoolboy Q raps the blues: "Ole gangsta crip, my papa was a bitch/ left me while hope just don't exist." It's one of many points on the record where Q casts something like a documentary eye on his own surroundings.

In the early morning on July 7th, Q tweeted out four bars from "Neva Change," the blistering centerpiece of Blank Face: "You see them lights get behind us/They pull me out for my priors/Won't let me freeze 'fore they fire/You say that footage a liar." The song was most likely recorded months prior. But hours after Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer while reaching for his license and the aftermath of the encounter was watched by millions, the rapper's words were more timely than most reporting. 8.3 / 10 Pitchfork.