The Neptunes empire seemed to wane in the 2010s in favor of the Pharrell Williams Show, the producer-turned-singer-turned-mogul embedding himself in the musical establishment so thoroughly it’s almost possible to forget he built his legacy on sounding like an iconoclast. But given a chance to express his weirder side again with a reconstituted N*E*R*D — albeit with less input than previous from braintrust members Chad Hugo and Shay Haley — his creative-eccentric side broke through the respectable-vet facade to prove that he could still summon that air of unpredictable eclecticism without contorting himself too much. There are just enough guest-spot slots given to A-plus-listers to give this the sheen of cool-celeb Importance: Rihanna puts on a bubbly quasi-Houstonian drawl on the Nintendo-punk opening salvo “Lemon,” Future lurches maniacally through dissonant AutoTune on Devo-via-Mannie Fresh explosion “1000,” we get a rare and welcome dispatch from the psychedelically abstract world of Andre 3000 in the window-rattling, hyper-shifting mini-suite"Rollinem 7’s,” and Kendrick pulls double duty as cop-violence deconstructionist over mordant lounge-bossa on “Don’t Don’t Do It” before bursting through the skulking tension of “Kites” to demand a revolution that celebrates humanity. But the famous-friends atmosphere is less interesting than the absolutely untethered too-many-ideas energy Pharrell brings as producer and songwriter, where nothing’s ever really settled and the mood and form of his songs snaps into new shapes with the unpredictability of an ambush.

– Nate Patrin