Kansas City artist Kadesh Flow has had a nice run of EPs since early 2018, starting with Room Service and running up to this January’s Motivated. Now he’s coming back with a slightly different type of project with his latest EP, Bone Bars & Pixel Flips.

If Motivated was Kadesh at his most current and straight up hip hop, BBPF is something of a journey back to his roots, coming up as a nerdcore artist rapping about video games and anime and playing his trombone. The key the EP, though, is that while this will absolutely appeal to those who are already fans of the video games being referenced throughout, you don’t necessarily have to be to enjoy Kadesh Flow’s music here. That’s because like any good nerdcore artist, he’s putting in the work and invested in hip hop culture enough to make sure this music bangs, regardless of what else is happening here. That means that the result has tracks like “Super Mario Bros (Desh Mix),” where Kadesh takes a video game theme that we all know and translates it into a trombone-led funk party that would actually sound pretty nice coming out of your car speakers as you drive around. He’s also doing the lyrical work to put himself in characters’ shoes and give some emotional weight to songs like “Forest” and “Beast Mode,” instead of just summarizing a game or making some winking references to them. By doing this, he’s making music that’s fun if you get the reference, but still resonates if you don’t know what game he’s talking about, because Kadesh is giving you all the information you need.

When you put everything together on Bone Bars & Pixel Flips, you get some fun music that builds off of fandom of some classic video games, but then translates them into some banging hip hop tracks that are uniquely Kadesh Flow. Trust me, you’re not going to find another EP that sounds quite like this.