A Great Chaos is the first major release by Ken Carson that doesn’t use the letter X prominently in its title. Appropriately, this is where Carson finds his niche and settles into it. That’s not to say A Great Chaos is either a staid retread or a bold new path. It’s where his noisy rage-beats hip hop jams finally break free of the increasingly stifling influence his mentor, Playboi Carti, had on Carson’s music. Carson comes into his own while still working in the parameters set up by Carti and his Opium Records sound, leaving Carson as maybe the Generation X to Carti’s Sex Pistols. Generation X wasn’t revolutionary, but they had some unforgettable paeans to the high-stakes obsessions and sentimentality of the adolescent mind. Carson does the same, laying it all out on the table with titles like “Fighting My Demons,” “Paranoid,” and “Hardcore.” Many of these tracks are successful enough to make their directness register as youthful anthemic insularity rather than a one note bad trip. Carson does it even better on the final track, the shimmering “I need u.” Over the sweetest and most indelible production of the album is a futuristic love song that sounds like it was beamed in from space. Carson opens his heart on a lovely melody, and this time it’s not just to draw blood.