Welcome to the world of hyper pop: the omnishambles of glitch effects from an 80’s video game, auto-tuned vocals talking about using MDMA, and overly produced trap where a metallic ax sound replaces a snare drum.

brakence chose to remain anonymous during his early stages while pioneering the sound of Gen-Z’s overly exaggerated take on 21st-century music. Now, the cat’s out of the bag. brakence’s (and yes, it’s styled in lowercase) identity is revealed: he’s Randy Findell, an 18-year-old college dropout, who’s poured all the rebellion out of his heart to create his debut album, punk2.

As his first major-label release, the project personifies his ambivalent identity, with 2000s chatroom song titles such as “tonight’s no good how about wednesday oh you’re in dallas on wednesday oh ok well then let’s just not see each other for 8 months and it doesn’t matter at all.”

Even so, there are clear production choices–inconsistent loudness and a lack of polish–that give away the album’s “do-it-yourself-ness, which probably could have been avoided if brakence spent that Columbia advance on a goddamn studio.

Despite the amateur sound, punk2 presents some very interesting textural elements that tickle the eardrums. Filtered electric guitar plucks and glitch effects set the landscape for the opener, “dropout,” where he’s “wasting all (his) money mixing dope and LSD.” Apart from cliché trap drums, brakence does a good job of keeping the sonics refreshing and creative, with new melodies, whispers, and formanted vocals filling up the spectrum, creating an addictive, eclectic ear-candy that you want to gobble up.

“fwb”–which stands for friends with benefits–and “fuckboy” continue in a similar sonically adventurous vein. “fwb” features cacophony of hypnotic textures and an 808-bass that’s louder than anything else in the song. “Now, I wanna fuck all my friends,” brakence exclaims hornily to a beat that sounds like pots and pans rhythmically clashing. “fuckboy” provides some deeper lyrics. Thoughtful reflections such as “I’ve never seen this distant/What success? My eyes are on a screen,” describe the reality of a social media-driven world and how it’s affected brakence’s perception of reality and his mental health.

After this point, alas, the album starts to crumble, and songs start to sound repetitive. “prozac” and “nosering” have the same, messy, bish-bosh-pots-pans-sound as “fwb.” “rosier/punk2,” however, adds some glue back to this messiness. The acoustic arrangements, paired with the softness of his voice, create the kind of chills in your body that only a good high can do, and brakence adds just the right amount of edginess and weirdness–pots, pans, and all.

punk2 is a messy project, but it’s also a gorgeous display of a new genre that a kid on his “fourth tab of acid” wrote on his laptop one night. There is, truly, not a single artist that sounds like brakence, and although the ideas presented sound half-convincing and confused at times, there are moments that keep you on the edge of your seat as no other big-budget-superstar has in years. It’s not horrible for someone that did it all on his own.