It’s easy enough to trace the impact of avant-garde-leaning groups to a future that has a lot more patience for their abrasions now, but it’s still hard to consider Dälek’s second album as a product of any time further back than a few months. Maybe that’s because From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots was noisy enough to thoroughly scare away circa-2002 heads who might’ve thought El-P was “kinda weird,” while still being visionary enough to anticipate a still-existing hunger for hip-hop that scraped noise’s outer limits. The drone-tone atmospherics and feedback-damaged shoegaze density that Still and Oktopus soak in is bracing, the kind of stuff that groups like Death Grips and clipping. would elaborate on a decade later. (If you ever wondered if there’s a threshold beyond “noise rap” for anyone to go, the 12-minute breath-snatching squall of “Black Smoke Rises” drags you past it by the ankle.) And the precedents don’t end there: MC Dälek carries himself like a supremely confident yet inwardly pessimistic apocalypse philosopher, one whose accusing eye roves so far along the evidence of cruelty in W-and-beyond-era American culture — the reality-warping intersection of race and religion (“Spiritual Healing”), the emotional toll of living in a state of anti-progress (“Trampled Brethren”), the way hip-hop’s transformation from guerrilla art to grindset commerce can leave a void in the heart (“From Mole Hills”)  — that it eventually turns back inward inside his own brain. And he finds that existence wanting, too, with the visceral alienation and fatalist self-hatred in “Forever Close My Eyes” almost too raw to even withstand. But his messaging doesn’t sacrifice point-blank urgency no matter how elaborate it gets; consider how he treats the relationship between aesthetic rebellion and societal revolution in “Hold Tight” and “Classical Homicide” as an inseparable partnership.