Eric Mayson is a name that you might not know, but if you’ve spent any time with the Minneapolis music scene over the past decade, you’ve probably heard him collaborating on keyboards and/or vocals with someone, such as Caroline Smith, Aby Wolf, Big Cats, or his hip hop band, Crunchy Kids, just to name a few. Back in 2015, he released his first solo album, Details, a sprawling epic piece of music that brought together all sorts of different musical worlds. Now he’s back with his second solo effort, Ōp-Nope, and it’s just as ambitious as you might have hoped.

When Mayson was working on Detail, he kind of realized in the course of writing it that he had actually written two twenty-minute songs that were broken up into movements. The album was still packaged as one with nineteen tracks, but once you spent time with it, it was clear that this was meant to listened to in one sitting with the pieces flowing into each other, not as a collection of singles. With Ōp-Nope, Mayson clearly went into the project knowing himself much better this time, and he’s given us an album with just two fifteen-minutes tracks, meant as a Side-A and Side-B. In another artists’ hands, I would probably encourage them to break things down, but Mayson is such a good writer and arranger, you never feel the length of either track. Instead, your interest is drawn into each movement, which has its own style and hook to it, but then transitions seamlessly into the next, so that you never really consciously notice when one part ends and the next begins. As with the Detail, Ōp-Nope brings together musical worlds where hip hop, neo-soul, indie rock, pop, classical, and jazz all exist not just side by side, but constantly intermingling. It’s a world where Grizzly Bear, Bilal, Herbie Hancock, and Danger Mouse all feel like influences. Over the course of the album, we get a lot of contributions to help bring Mayson’s vision to life, including Ross Orenstein, Theo Langason, Aeysha Kinnunen, Big Cats, Eric Blomquist, Kara Motta, Margaret Johnson, Toby Ramaswamy, Jesse Schuster, and Arlen Peiffer. That’s a lot of different musical voices, but they are all there for specific purposes and Mayson deploys each contributor in a way that both plays to their strengths and serves the greater vision of each composition. Of course, the through line through all of this is Mayson’s voice and keyboards. He has a beautiful and strong tone to his singing voice, and he’s sure of himself enough to never over do it, but still use his full range in ways that keep your ears perked, never knowing for sure where each vocal line is going to go.

Ōp-Nope is quite the musical journey, but Mayson has struck the right balance between ambitious and accessible. It will take you to unexpected places, around some twists and turns and back again, but it also never feels like a chore. That’s because for as grand and technically challenging as this album is, it’s also incredibly fun and soulful, so that when you press play you become so engrossed and excited about where the music is going, you don’t realize how quickly the fifteen minutes has passed.