Plenty changed in EST Gee’s life between his run of beloved, self-issued introductory mixtapes —including 2019’s El Toro and the following year’s Ion Feel Nun—and the release of 2023’s MAD. He signed to CMG, the imprint founded by the Memphis legend Yo Gotti—a pioneer for Gee’s model of introspective but club-conscious hip-hop, released at a constant, steady clip. He scored a major hit with Last Ones Left, his 2022 collaboration with the Detroit rapper 42 Dugg. And he’d learned to push his style to intriguing extremes, his vocals growing deeper and more jagged, his writing cutting ever closer to the bone. So it’s little surprise when MAD opens with a song title like “PRAY YOU DIE IN SURGERY”—a name that, from a lesser rapper, might seem like a stunt or cheap provocation, but from EST Gee simply communicates the fury and pain that colours everything he writes. None of which is to suggest MAD is uniformly serious or sombre. A track after “SURGERY”, Gee is riffing on the Shirley Bassey sample Kanye West had previously flipped for “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”; the instinctive, try-anything ethos of the 2000s mixtape makes his confessional raps feel as if they’re coming straight from a therapy session. When he raps, on “25MIN FREESTYLE”, that “I don’t feel anxious, I don’t feel fear/My heart cold, that’s why I buried it”, you believe that Gee believes it—for the moment, at least, before the next memory comes barrelling to the front of his mind. It’s fitting that, for “HOTBOYS”, Gee tapped Boosie Badazz, the icon from Baton Rouge. Like Gee, Boosie has forged a career writing profoundly, sometimes shockingly honest songs that remain anchored to a sense of brightness and community—Boosie through his intermittent bursts of joy, Gee through the buoyancy of his production. While MAD is an exploration of EST Gee’s psyche in the manner his listeners have come to expect, it also feels meaningfully connected to the world outside his skull.