For an artist whose music is so suffused with urgency, EST Gee has staked his career on remarkable patience. From the opening song of his debut mixtape, 2019’s El Toro, the Louisville native gives off the air of someone willing to bide his time—to lay in wait for years until presented with an opportunity to right wrongs visited upon himself and others, to settle grudges that simmer but never evaporate, to enact the plans he never shared with anybody else. So on “The King,” the track that served as his introduction to the world, the distant and recent past blur—his embarrassment at the times he couldn’t help lift his friends out of poverty, his pride at the expansion of an interstate trafficking network—into a map of raw ambition, where each desperate, isolated incident becomes one step in a long, near-mythic journey. Vocally, Gee charts a middle course between the ultra-animation of Kevin Gates and the affected monotone of mid- and late-period Future. But he works in the same lineage, reliving the process of traumatization, processing, healing, and retraumatization on endless loop. Early on El Toro, Gee references the Greeks, though the framework could just as easily be Freudian for the way old injuries bleed into the present. An economical, sometimes unnervingly spare writer, Gee takes this long view throughout the moody but kinetic record. In “2015, I made in minutes what they make a week,” he raps on “On the Island,” before hitting listeners with a pair of hairpin reversals: “2016, I hit a lick and made like twenty G’s/2018, karma came, it brought me to my knees.” But when he zooms into a single scene, the details are striking. Gee senses a rival respects him because of the way he mumbles during a conversation (“El Toro”); he specifies which drug packages he used to conceal inside which parts of his wardrobe (“No Talking”); he describes, twice, the dread that swells up inside him as he watches a closed door, waiting for it to open. The effect is not to make these warring senses of destiny and anxiety seem like frequent recurrences, but rather to make them seem permanent.