Saul Williams only has a birthday every four years. I don’t profess to care much about determinism (or astrology), but this fact feels astonishingly fitting for Williams, a known maverick of the music industry interested in neither genre nor other musical conventions. One imagines him playing hide and seek with his own date of birth, letting it wink out of existence for a few years of a time before pouncing on it when it does appear. The transient, fundamentally unstable nature of time and all other universal structures is what gives Williams’s newest LP both its name and its thematic basis. Leap Life is a huge project, devoting itself to the Herculean task of tackling questions of colonialism, technology, empire, ancestry—often all at the same time. Quite evidently a departure from some of his earlier, more distinctly hip-hop leaning work, Leap Life draws on the collaborative efforts of prolific producer Carlos Niño and Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja. Niño’s work is what binds this fairly eclectic collection of music together—Williams has clearly been influenced by his interest in soundscapes and instrumental sketches, with several songs on Leap Life drifting in and out of a number of genres and inspirations, never settling for long enough to sound entirely familiar. Still, much of this record is at its best when it slinks inside of one genre or another—hip-hop, trip-hop, pop—and deconstructs it from the inside. Williams has said before that he is “either inspired or disgusted” by popular music. This standoffish approach, co-opting the parts of a genre that work and shaving off the ones that he disdains, works very well on Leap Life, and its brightest points are the songs that are more audibly pop or dance-adjacent. Take “Robot Slave,” a furious meditation on techno-capitalism: it stands out because it makes you want, desperately, to get up and dance. The song opens with Williams singing close to the mic over futuristic buzzing sounds, a constant, insistent beeping. Then it erupts into a heady, unsettlingly addictive amapiano-style beat, making you nod to the rhythm even as the chorus is working to point out the link between technology and servitude (“shaking that robot wake… shaking that robot slave”). “The Dagger,” too, features similar amapiano influences. The beats and percussion lend a wild, kinetic aspect to Williams’s lyrics, which roam from the personal (“and you should know by now my lineage is Haitian”) to the philosophical—namely, the broader idea of music as a weapon (“there is a warrior described as a dancer / And when she moves her hips it’s just to place her dagger.”) Indeed, percussion is urgent and essential across the entirety of Leap Life, often providing an invigorating zap of sound to a track that might otherwise drift along without grounding (“Controlled Is Not Controllable,” for instance) or a counterpoint to the album’s less coherent parts. Leap Life is an act of experimentation, an exploration into what music itself can exist as. That is an essential and important venture, and Williams is one of the best musicians to do it. Some parts of the album’s experimental elements are anchoring and emotionally essential to its tapestry. Opener “Baobab Constellations,” which sounds like an improvisation in slow, lovely free-fall, puts Williams alongside a full band who are all working to stretch out their sound to its very corners. The mixing from Niño here does well to bring out each sliver of sound, Kamasi Washington’s tenor saxophone sounding particularly incisive. “Mazahua,” which takes its name from one of the indigenous languages of Mexico, and features Yaotl Mazahua singing in it, also contains all manner of sounds: a conch, bird calls, rattles. The range of them conveys a feeling of life that is held within the track, bleeding out into your ears as the song travels across histories and conflicts, grounded in the fierce clarity of the image of a “kid [who] throws a rock at a tank / It’s just a rock. What is it against a tank?” Naturally, though, not every experiment works, and some of the tracks on Leap Life seem aimless or out of place on an otherwise powerful record. “Not Everything For Sale” features a reworking from Del Naja of sections of Béla Bartók’s famous symbolist opera “Bluebeard’s Castle,” but without much effect—the song seems to loop ineffectually around itself as Williams reiterates familiar messages around capitalism and resistance. There is an overarching feeling of Leap Life trying to do a huge amount in the space of one record, and occasionally a listener is left with a feeling that the same ideas—as vital as they are—are being repeated over and over, or that two songs are working to achieve a similar effect. But these are small concerns, and they do nothing to sully Leap Life’s greatest achievement, which is the way it pays attention. The notion of attention being art or attention being a political act is of course not new, but Williams’s capacity for attention on this record is astonishing. He is perpetually concerned with all manner of injustices and conflicts, and—to the benefit of the album—fascinated by the sounds he might create to explore them. Sometimes this coalesces into a pulsing, crushing feeling of cynicism powered by intense hip-hop and percussion (as on “Conspiracy”), or into chilling, rhyme-less poetry (as on “Great, Great Grand-mother,” where Williams reads passages of Mbuso Nkosi’s book These Potatoes Look Like Humans, which assesses the impact of dispossession and colonial violence on Black South Africans). But sometimes it is as simple as walking through a busy city with his eyes open and his recorder running. “Coming Forth” is less a song than a field recording. It finds Williams, and us, on a busy street in Cairo. Williams talks to us above the mayhem, somehow surprised by how easily he blends in: “Ain’t no police in sight / And ain’t nobody white…The way we are / looked at here is the way we’ve always / been seen.” But he lets the place talk, too, the honking taxis, the Qu’ran readings, the arguments in choppy, angular Arabic dialect from passers-by. And around those sounds are more sounds—a saxophone, drums, intermittent singing from some point in the distance. It is a supreme act of concentration, and one that demands its listener’s attention too. Some two centuries ago a poet concentrated all his attention on a Grecian urn and asked what it could teach him. His conclusion was simple: beauty is truth, and truth beauty. On Leap Life, Williams takes his place as one of the great poets of our times. But his message is different, even opposite. Truth can be ugly, he seems to say. History is a difficult thing. But we must continue to pursue it, even when we don’t like what we see. For him, music and poetry is not a way of attaining beauty, but rather a way to affect change and resistance. “They will never get away,” he declares on “Vengeful Spirit.” “We will catch them anywhere they hide.” [Big Dada] Mariam Abdel-Razek is a writer and critic based in London. Her writing has previously appeared in The Line of Best Fit, The Tonearm, and Varsity.