Ten tracks capturing the tension and absurdity of life in the US circa 2026. Long Beach rapper Vince Staples’ sixth album, 2024’s Dark Times, wasn’t quite the downer its title suggested, but a portrait of an artist whose decade of success had come with complications. Two years later, the times are even darker and Staples is coming back harder. Built around the scuzzy sounds of noise rock and post-punk, its 10 tracks capture the tension, absurdity, and emotional weight of contemporary US existence, using the well-worn touchstones of Americana to turn the American dream inside out. “Why do I live in fear of a gun and a badge?” Staples wonders on “Go! Go! Gorilla” before dredging up a memory of being choke-slammed by cops at age 12. On “Only in America,” he invokes Friday night fireworks and white picket fences for a scathing indictment of the land of the free: “Stole me and they brought me to the USA/Thank you, I guess.” War doubles as entertainment on “7 in the Morning,” while “Blackberry Marmalade” arrives with a video styled like a first-person shooter game which closes with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”