2017 had been a busy year for Coolzey, who released two EPs, Coolsay Too and Kilzey. That wasn’t enough for the Los Angeles-based artist, though, as he comes back in 2018 with his third official full-length album, Coolzey and the God Damned Friend Killers.

If you’re already familiar with Coolzey, you know the one thing you can expect is that you don’t know what to expect from release to release. It could be nerdcore, it could be lounge, it could be rock, it could be any number of things. On this album, we get a heavy dose of Coolzey’s alt-rock side, with the majority of the songs being guitar-based. This might not appeal to the more hard core hip hop fans, but while the majority of the album is in this rock lane, there are a few moments when Coolzey switches things up and brings in some hip hop or dance elements, such as “Bit by Bit,” “The Start-Up Son,” or “Forever 21.” What makes this album especially interesting to me is the way in which Coolzey is able to find a way to connect these different styles and make it all sound like Coolzey. Part of it just comes from the way that Coolzey treat all of these different styles like they are on a level playing field, and another part is Coolzey’s sarcastic and self-deprecating sense of humor that’s present no matter what genre his music might fall in. The result is an album that sounds like it could have come out in the mid-90s, making me feel like that teenage kid in Dallas that would go to all-age punk shows at The Orbit Room or listen to The Adventure Club on Sunday nights. That is to say that this album feels very familiar to me.

This isn’t a straight ahead hip hop album, but it’s not a straight ahead rock album, either. What’s impressive, though, is that Coolzey finds a way to mix his influences in a way that feels natural and is still really fun to listen to.