Ye is a reflection of a troubled man in troubled times.

Hours before he gathered the most famous people in music to a ranch in Wyoming to listen to his

new album, Kanye West’s wife Kim Kardashian met with President Donald Trump. That sentence

in itself would have seemed like something out of a dystopian nightmare back in 2010, when West

released My Dark Twisted Beautiful Fantasy. At that time, West’s public persona had begun to

unravel, with the infamous VMAs incident, which was followed by high-profile break from music.

When he returned with MDTBF, West was much different than the artist we had come to know.

He’d spiraled.

Today, the darkness that West inhabits is reflected in both the world around us, in his persona, and in his music.

Ye, at its heart, is a cry for help. And it gets to the terror and chaos of 2018—a year defined by mass shootings, unruly men with god complexes (West included), and absurd ideas. The darkest and most twisted thoughts in our society have been activated and motivated—in politics and popular culture.

“I love myself way more than I love you / And I thought about killing myself today / So best know I thought about killing you,” West says on the opening track. The song, “I Thought About Killing You,” then settles into a medicated beat with screams on the down-beat. It’s chilling. The mood is terrifying, coming from a man who’s said he developed an opioid addiction following plastic surgery.

On the next song, “Yikes,” he delves into this darkness even further, with West warning in the chorus, “Shit could get menacin’, frightenin’, find help / Sometimes I scare myself, myself.”

He juxtaposes the state of the world with the state of his mind, referencing North Korea and #MeToo alongside his own death, drugs, and bipolar disorder.These two tracks are a dangerous opening to an album that arrives at a time when popular music—specifically emerging trends in rap—has been so depressed it’s been fatal. Late last year, Lil Peep, a promising young rapper on the forefront of this trend, died from an accidental overdose. His music—much like this new West album—was filled with these fatalist cries for help.

Those messages weren’t subtle, much like the broad strokes on Ye. And while Peep’s death woke up the industry from a Xanex slumber, the sound is still very much in right now, with the likes of Juice WRLD and Lil Xan making big moves this spring.