A vulnerable, dense listen from moden hip-hop’s most revered figure

First comes the poisonous peak of Disc 1, destined to be the album’s most notorious track. We Cry Together is an expletive-loaded screaming match with Taylour Paige that slams though accusations of infidelity, arrested development, gaslighting, power trippin’, guilt trippin’, egotism, narcissism, Trumpism, “fake” feminism and much more. The family home picks through smashed glass on an escalating bum-note piano arpeggio towards a truce born of weakness, not resolution. “This is what the world sounds like,” Whitney says.

Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is not about sonic innovation. Lamar sounds supremely comfortable in his own distinctive jazz-tinged world where elegant piano maintains a harmonically transporting thread and songs can ambush your heart in a way that’s more Marvin Gaye than Dr Dre. The climactic numbers on each disc, Purple Hearts and Mirror, are irresistible inroads for hip hop agnostics.

But it’s his emotional terrain, especially on the revealing second disc, that’s likely to perpetuate a reputation that already transcends the genre. It’s telling that he mostly refrains here from the cross-promotional allegiances that have become increasingly common across hip-hop. Kodak Black, Ghostface Killah and Lamar’s cousin Baby Keem are among the exceptions, all notable for different reasons, but when he mentions king-hitters Kanye and Drake in passing, it’s only to say that he finds them confusing.

In the home stretch it’s clear that he’s come not to defend rap’s crown of thorns, but to abdicate in favour of the sometimes fraught family pictured on the album’s cover. “I can’t please everybody,” goes the affecting piano-vocal refrain of Crown, a final, downcast meditation before he lets loose the floodgates of inter-generational shame and abuse that have led him here.

Twin epics Auntie Diaries and Mother I Sober, the latter with its crushing refrain sung by Beth Gibbons of Portishead, are sublime, poetic purges that manage to transcend the trauma of childhood repression and self-recrimination to soar on exhilarating swells of orchestration. Lamar raps about God a lot, but here you can practically feel the Almighty enter the room.

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Much has been made of Lamar’s declaration that this will be his last album – that is, for his current rap label Top Dawg Entertainment. What that means for future recordings is deliberately vague, but he’s clearly drawing a line at the end of this one.

“Personal gain off my pain, it’s nonsense/Darlin’ my demons is off the leash for a moshpit,” he raps. It’s a disco mosh pit, baby, complete with Barry White strings. “I choose me, I’m sorry,” goes the elated refrain. Who can blame him?

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