It’s the downward spiral, got me suicidal/ But too scared to do it so these pills will be the rifle.” That’s how Detroit rap phenom Danny Brown kicked off the second verse of the title track to his breakout 2011 mixtape XXX, and his astounding new album and Warp debut Atrocity Exhibition picks up right where that record left off. A thematic sequel to XXX’s hairline-trigger hedonism and despair, Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown ruminating on life after greater success—how things changed, how they haven’t, and how the potential of the future is often irreconcilable with the realities of the present. “I couldn’t tell the story of what happened after XXX because I was living,” Brown explains. “I had to live life to write about it.