Last week, the Blue Sky Black Death Twitter account tweeted: "Been wondering lately if consistency or diversity is more important for an album."

See, I wondered this myself regarding BSBD and Nacho Picasso. For the Glory and Lord of the Fly, dope and deranged as they were, could've been the same double album, pulled from the same sessions. Their new Exalted doesn't exactly break new ground—there are no ballads, no dance songs, unless your dance is to slowly waver like an underwater plant as you try to stay on your feet. It is, however, by far the hardest, creepiest, most pharmacologically experimental of any of their efforts. I wanted to hear more about the angst, the depression—the Mr. Scarface shit—that always seems to lurk around the corner of such grimily hedonistic rappers' self-medicated good times. I didn't quite get that (though its presence feels closer to the surface than ever), but what I got is this crew's most realized mess yet.

BSBD, a veteran production unit with plenty of work and acclaim under its belt, makes productions that sound like the greasy, cold, flat shine of Juvenile's gold teeth in 1999, chomping, belching deep bass and dark smoke. As for Nacho, you can virtually hear the size of his pupils in the booth, the hunger in his cells. His gift for hooks and pop-cult skewering is deeper than ever; when you hear the "that's nacho bitch, that's nacho chain" of the masterful "Mob Ties," it feels like the obvious anthem he'd had stashed for opening night all along. The Paul's Boutique sample ("Stop That Train" from "B-Boy Bouillabaisse," to be specific) on "Kicking Out Windows" made me inhale sharply with the recognition and the recent memory of MCA's passing, but most of all with the forehead-slap of how great its usage is. Nacho is still a hilarious motherfucker who can name-check Jonah Hex and says things like "My consultant/Look like Michael Bolton"—yet Exalted brews up more menace than just about anything you're going to hear from the NW, short of the Melvins. "You need to get your evidence up," he tells a pig, "while these youngsters kill each other for 11s and such, hmm." "Public Enemy" floats impossibly hard, spiky, unstable, like some unexploded WWII depth charge. It's the type of song that makes me want to do drugs I'm too old for, in a car I'll never be able to afford, with it playing loud enough for me to get a ticket in Kirkland—from two counties away.

The first two BSBD/Nacho albums were given away free, in true dope-dealer fashion, but this one costs you five; the heads they've so freely fed with their aggy funk are no doubt happy to have PayPal's servers ringing if they can get their ears around this newest. This is their moment, and the people are speaking, jibbering, jaws clenched, eyes wild. The kids out here aren't all right; some are fucked up beyond belief, cold as frozen nails, and this right here is the shit that speaks to them. Seattle: To sleep another wink on the works of Nacho Picasso and Blue Sky Black Death—a newer, darker people's champ than Seattle rap's been used to—would be what's really criminal. recommended