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While the city might have made him, it seems that Kendrick Lamar has outgrown his native Compton. To Pimp A Butterfly is a war cry, an attempt to rally against the faults of American society; in particular its treatment of the black community in the wake of Ferguson. It’s a brave album, even more so than his previous full-length effort good kid, M.A.A.D city. While that record saw Lamar lament the state of black America, Lamar is now ready to tackle the problems that he perceives head-on. He does this in a fantastically daring way by casting his gaze over the canon of black music, flitting between everything from spaced-out jazz (For Free?) to mutant funk (King Kunta).

Lamar recently declared himself a “writer” as opposed to a rapper and, indeed, the wordplay throughout is witty and intelligent — for example, Kendrick refers simultaneously to the chains of slavery and the gold chains of gangster culture into a single object of entrapment. The album is erratic and paranoid, and Lamar shows an awareness that he could be viewed as the encapsulation of everything he decries, describing himself at one point as the “biggest hypocrite of 2015”. Lamar doesn’t hesitate in attacking gang culture, lambasting it in the vitriolic album highlight The Blacker The Berry. This track is matched only in ambition by Mortal Man, a monolithic track that summons up the ghosts of Mandela and Tupac to aid Lamar’s cause.

The first single from the album, i, received a mixed reaction when it came out a few months ago. It was a departure from Lamar’s sound on GKMC, and there was uncertainty as to the song’s message, with its refrain of “I love myself”. However, it makes sense in the context of the album. Lamar, having assumed the voice of the black community itself, forgets his missives and draws the album to a close on a note of empowerment.

Lamar obviously intends for this album to be a classic. The title itself when read in conjunction with the album cover (depicting a group of black men standing over the corpse of a judge outside the White House) alludes to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and it’s not a stretch to imagine this album someday being viewed in the same regard that we now hold that text in; as a radical and thoroughly important commentary on the racial and social tensions that continue to cut through American culture.