Atrocity Exhibition can be seen as the third work in a trilogy that began with XXX. Here, Danny Brown's songs of pain and release are accompanied by dense sonics from all over the musical map.

Danny Brown is an auteur. Hip-hop has a tradition of collaboration, but the Detroit rapper is a one-man show who, while he reps his own Bruiser Brigade and works frequently with a handful of producers, has a voice and vision completely his own. You can think of his progression over the last five years in filmic terms.

Danny Brown's first Warp release is named after a Joy Division song inspired by writer J.G. Ballard's collection of the same title. "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown," one of the chapters in the Ballard book, would have been just as apt an inscription on an album that looks more like a mid-'80s 12" designed by Neville Brody than anything classified as hip-hop. Old comrade Paul White produces two-thirds of the tracks, lending gnarled, sometimes clanging and blasting rhythms that complement Brown's elevated levels of dread and anxiety and slightly reduced amount of vulgar mischief. Brown spends most of his time looking darkly inward. In that berserk yet lucid high pitch, he raps about being more desperate to score than his clients