Company Flow made some of the most confrontational hip-hop to emerge out of late ’90s NYC, so when the man responsible for half their apocalyptic lyrics and all their lo-fi/hi-stress production went out on his own, it was every bit a reinforcement of a signature style as it was a solo-debut breakthrough. Yet Fantastic Damage isn’t merely a lateral move from Funcrusher Plus — it’s an amplification of everything that makes El-P sound like an epiphany-haunted, hyperverbal doomsayer on the mic and one of hip-hop’s greatest analog-filth industrialists on the decks. The way those two tendencies collide in his work builds off this stressed, info-overload panic that sees the dystopia coming before everyone else does; listeners felt it “captured” the embattled, anxious combo of we’re fucked/what next in the immediate wake of 9/11 even though the bulk of the album was completed while the towers still stood. But the things that really haunt El are far older — think his brief but blunt retelling of a cop’s killing of a homeless man, there amidst his memories of being a hip-hop-infatuated ’85 4th-grader on “Squeegee Man Shooting” — and the way they’re exorcised is, especially from a decades-later perspective, like watching the future catch up to predictions from Philip K. Dick novels from the ’60s. So when he envisions the mass production of familial abuse (“Stepfather Factory”) or torches the remnants of whatever monopolistic culture it was that Uncle Walt was trying to build (“Dead Disnee”) or just flat-out asks “why the things we find beautiful undermine power?” (“Deep Space 9mm”), it’s with the conviction of someone buzzing off the realization that his grievances are a lot more real and widespread than he’d been told they were. And while he’s not quick to claim any easy solutions, he at least knows how to give you enough catharsis to help you think straight again.