Fatboi Sharif is an emcee form New Jersey who has been releasing music since the mid-2010s, and he’s been doing so at a really steady pace. So much so that just a few months removed from dropping the brilliant album Preaching in Havana, done in collaboration with producer noface, he’s right back with a new EP done with frequent collaborator Roper Williams, Planet Unfaithful.

While making a brilliant album like Preaching in Havana is certainly no easy feat, there is something to be said about the challenge of making a short EP like Planet Unfaithful, and still managing to pack a wallop in the process. Roper Williams is once again cooking up some really inventive psychedelic, dense, and dark loops, the kind where Sharif can dance around the beat and drop his abstract poetry in unexpected ways. Fatboi Sharif is doing so with not just a lot of creativity in terms of his word choices and his placements in regard to the beat, but he’s also dancing around and coming at you from a lot of different angles with his lyrics. One moment he might be playful and sassy, making some pop culture references, or poking the bear with some sarcastic humor, and another moment he might be trying to rile up some listeners with some keen social and political observations. Another moment he might be reaching deep within himself to lay out some really introspective rhymes, only to then turn around and talk some mad shit. He manages to pack all of this into six short songs that will completely suck you into his world, only to spit you back out on the other side, leaving you shocked that this fascinating ride is already over. Oh, and did I mention that ELUCID shows up to go pound for pound on “Scrabble Board Pieces”? There’s a lot to unpack for a project that is only about fifteen minutes in length.

Planet Unfaithful looks like a filler release on paper, but Fatboi Sharif and Roper Williams don’t do filler releases. This short little project coming a few months after a full-length album from Sharif is complex, engaging, and entertaining, giving you much more to digest than most artists will give you over the course of projects four times as long.