"I'm not a fucking role model, I know this/I'm a 19-year-old fucking emotional coaster with pipe dreams," Tyler, the Creator raps on Goblin. That would be putting it lightly: With his pension for horrific lyrics, on-stage outrageousness and old-fashioned hustle, the L.A. rapper-producer behind the hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All has become an engrossing, disconcerting trending-topic. His second solo disc (and first on a proper label) is a shock-and-awe psycho-drama — complete with lyrics about stabbing Bruno Mars, hating his absentee dad, eating Xannies and dressing up in panties, tied together by a dialog with a therapist (voiced by Tyler) who really doesn't seem to be helping much.

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"Rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome," he raps in his creepily old-sounding voice against the ominous electro-sway of "Tron Cat." But if Tyler's lyrics are early-Eminem evil, his offhandedly lush, left-field R&B-tinged tracks are like strips of light sneaking through the cracks of a lunatic's drawn blinds; on "Nightmare" images of his mother being knifed are set to a tender piano filigree, and on "Fish," forlorn cocktail jazz and Prince-ly ballad moves soundtrack uncool thoughts about Taylor Swift. "She" and "Her" even have passing moments of lyrical humanity to go with the pliant music ("When I'm with my friends I just put on a front / But in the back of my top I'm writing songs about 'we'"). It's almost like there's boyish innocence lurking underneath all that bile.

Listen to "Goblin": 

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“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”