Yeat has always operated at the center of his own universe, and ADL (A Dangerous Lyfe / A Dangerous Love) is the most literal statement of that fact he has ever committed to tape. This is a 21-track double album with Elton John on one song, Grimes on another, NBA YoungBoy somewhere in the middle, and a concept built around watching your own funeral and wedding happen at the same time. It is ambitious to a degree that borders on absurdist, and for long stretches, it works.

The Elton John collaboration, “Lose Control,” is the kind of feature that sounds impossible before you hear it and then makes strange sense once you do. John is not playing a prominent vocal role here. His contribution draws on a sample from “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” and a piano line, and the result is weirder and more interesting than a straightforward Yeat-meets-classic-rock mashup would be. It does not feel like stunt casting. It feels like Yeat genuinely does not care where the sounds come from, only that they serve the atmosphere he is building.

The Grimes feature, “Face The Flamë” with NBA YoungBoy, is another highlight. Yeat has said he has been a fan of Grimes since “Oblivion” in 2012, and the two do share a kind of alien detachment that makes the collaboration feel earned rather than engineered. YoungBoy is present too, doing what YoungBoy does, which is show up and be louder than the surrounding material.

The album’s structural problem is also its most honest characteristic. At 21 tracks with this many collaborators, ADL cannot always decide what it wants to be. The first half has a ferocious momentum. The second half loses it in places, drifting into stretches where Yeat sounds like he is filling space rather than defining it. The concept of the dual disc, dangerous life on one side and dangerous love on the other, is more interesting as a frame than it is as a listening experience. The seams show.

But the high-octane moments are genuinely high. Yeat at his best makes music that sounds like nothing else in rap right now, a compressed, pressurized sound that owes something to slowed-and-chopped aesthetics while operating entirely on its own logic. When ADL is firing, it is easy to understand why he has the audience he has.

There is also something worth noting about the ambition itself. Most artists at Yeat’s commercial peak take fewer risks, not more. They consolidate. They put out a tight ten-track record that confirms what people already liked. Yeat went in the other direction, stuffed the album with experiments, and invited Elton John. Some of those experiments do not land. All of them are interesting.

ADL is a flawed, fascinating record. It will irritate some listeners and reward others. Both groups will probably be right.