Last year, I fell victim to Instagram reels. I scrolled for hours in morbid fascination at people making cocktails in their washing machine, ordering Dunkin’ coffees with 20 spoonfuls of sugar and 15 pumps of caramel, sprinkling Sour Patch Kids in a bowl of spaghetti. I realized that the internet has become a parody of itself; I wondered if it was even possible to satirize the Web in art anymore when the absurdity is already so blatant.

If anyone can do it, it’s Bladee. The Swedish rapper and Drain Gang CEO has always managed to incorporate the digital realm into his music in ways so resonant that he’s cultivated a massive following that worship him to an almost religious extent. His latest album Cold Visions is his most accessible yet.

Cold Visions was released in April of last year, but its icy texture feels designed for winter listening, whether soundtracking frigid walks or hibernating in your bedroom. A glaring emptiness sits at the heart of the record: “Having success is not that dope/ Being in LA off that coke/ Surrounded by people I don’t even know/ Surrounded by people I don’t even like,” the 30-year-old raps through his teeth on the misanthropic “DONT WANNA HANG OUT.”

There are a staggering 30 tracks on Cold Visions, adding up to an hour-long record, and each one bursts with layers of zippy sound. The list of producers is predictably lengthy; it includes F1LTHY, who served as one of the main producers of Playboi Carti’s wonderfully weird Whole Lotta Red, an obvious influence for Bladee and every young artist doing rage rap right now. The bass often booms loudly enough to shake the walls of a car. There are recurring trap beats and otherworldly sound effects, like bubbly synths or samples of maniacal laughs, plus a voice repeating the album title like an incantation.

The never-ending clamor feels explicitly Gen Z in its impulse for instant gratification. Cold Visions feels compulsively overpacked, a stream of attempts to induce dopamine release under which Bladee and his friends reveal their vulnerabilities, which mostly consist of a feeling of alienation worsened by fame. Yung Lean raps about having 20 friends on the guestlist yet not knowing any of them; Bladee says he’s “addicted to my status.”

I’d tried getting into Bladee’s music for a while to no avail. His large discography can be intimidating; he and Yung Lean unveiled the collaborative LP Psykos just a month before the surprise release of Cold Visions. Since 2014, he’s shared a slew of albums and mixtapes, but Cold Visions is immediately welcoming. The minute-long, blaring opener “PARANOIA INTRO” is an exhilarating entrance, a beat drop exploding after Bladee’s playful declaration of not having many brain cells left. On the next track, he deadpans about buying a thousand Smurfs on eBay — “I was on shrooms, needless to say” — shortly before recalling a nightmare: “I’m waiting for disaster or something else bad to happen/ I’m in this beauty pageant and everybody’s laughing.”

The strange humor and anguish are woven together masterfully; it doesn’t feel like he’s being ironic as a way of hiding, because it doesn’t sound like he wants to hide at all. “This shit is very sad,” he states on “YUNG SHERMAN,” on which he compares the feeling of losing your phone to having a hole in your heart and drawls fairly intriguing internet poetry: “I’m in Off-White Nike like a hypebeast/ Weed hitting me like a nice breeze/ My whole lifе is like a livestream.” He makes an incredibly catchy hook out of the pretty devastating line, “What if I never make it back from this damn panic attack?”

Speaking of catchy, the Skrillex-assisted “D.O.A” is another highlight, offering one of the best melodies on the LP with the simple repetition of the three letters in the title. Skrillex gives the song a pulsating beat and fluttering synths, making it a moment of levity. “DONT DO DRUGZ,” the next track, quickly returns to conflict: “I told my bro, ‘You gotta stop’/ And he told me, ‘But for what?’/ Man, I don’t know.” On both “TERRIBLE EXCELLENCE” and “I DONT LIKE PEOPLE,” Bladee raps about wanting to kill; he calls himself the Joker on “ONLY GOD IS MADE PERFECT.”

Cold Visions would not hit as hard as it does without this sense of extremity. It’s also undeniable that Bladee’s aura of mystique adds to the magic. He rarely does interviews, but when he does, he comes off as exactly as eccentric as his music suggests. In 2019, he casually relayed to The Fader, “The last time I was in Thailand, I got hit by lightning. It wasn’t a situation where I could go to the hospital, so I just went to bed. I was Googling it and all it said was you will die really painfully [laughs]. So I was like OK, but it must have just grazed me or something.” Also on “ONLY GOD IS MADE PERFECT,” he proclaims, “Man, I’m stepping on the court/ Man, you’re watching YouTube Shorts/ I’m very far from regular, you could call me irregular,” serving as a somewhat sufficient self-explanation.

Cold Visions does sound like it was created by someone who was grazed by lightning, but it’s also palpably the product of a depressed, isolated generation inundated with relentless reminders of tragedy to the point of desensitization, forcing us to grasp for severity in order to feel anything at all. Though we’ve been backed into a corner where the closest consolation to reach for is irony to mask the pain, Bladee conveys the ridiculous experience though inventing new paths. His comedy is not a shield; he’s unarmed throughout Cold Visions, instead inviting listeners into his dark depths, which are more relatable than most of us are willing to admit.

After first failing to get into Bladee, I have now (according to my last.fm) listened to Bladee tracks 500 times in the past 30 days. His songs feel as addictive as Instagram reels, yet infinitely less destructive. In my dopamine-starved state, I reach for Cold Visions the same way I reach for my mint-flavored Elf Bar. The difference is that after a while, hitting a vape doesn’t offer sensation anymore, whereas Cold Visions will not run out of inspiration. Even if Bladee is a mysterious, God-like figure to his fans, it’s because he communicates something searingly human with endearing, game-changing idiosyncrasy. When my friend asked me what the appeal of Instagram reels is, I answered, “It’s like being dead without being dead.” Like any addiction, it’s a chance to turn your brain off. Bladee’s music is like tuning in to a new, exciting world, choosing creative escape over mind-numbing, slot-machine-like content.