A year after his self-released breakthrough, El Toro, EST Gee’s 2020 mixtape Ion Feel Nun marked an undeniable step forward—a career accelerant that feels, down to the BPMs of its songs, like a locomotive ramping up to top speed. At just 11 songs in 27 minutes, Ion Feel Nun cleanly distills EST Gee’s artistic project, making each harrowing incident from his past seem like a character-building moment to which he is nevertheless subjected on endless loop each time he closes his eyes. Speaking of momentum, Gee’s choice of collaborators for Ion Feel Nun is telling of his taste for the urgent. Here he taps Icewear Vezzo (“Rotimi”) and Sada Baby (“Taught Different”), each rapper a member of the uptempo, freewheeling rap scene that took hold in Detroit in the late 2010s and early 2020s; “On the Floor” pairs him with Vezzo and Payroll Giovanni, the linchpin of the playful maximalism that dominated that city in the era just prior. As on Vezzo and Sada Baby’s own songs, the production for Gee’s tracks here turns confrontationally digital, as if the web browser is trying to rob listeners while it tries to make them dance. With El Toro, Gee had emerged as a more or less fully formed vocalist, his songs loaded with grit and soulfulness. But on Ion Feel Nun, he pushes himself further into the eccentric edges of his delivery—see “Special,” where he pushes the limits of vocal fry so far that his takes sound at times like a serrated knife cutting through the mix. This is more than just a stylistic tic: It accentuates the way so much of Gee’s writing feels like asides he might mumble to himself, too raw and too pained for anyone else to hear.