Everyone suspected a new Kendrick Lamar album was coming soon — between a Super Bowl halftime show next year and a string of Grammy nominations for “Not Like Us,” the time was as ripe as could be. Still, fans woke up Friday to the surprise release of “GNX,” Lamar’s follow-up to the ruminative “Mr. Morality and the big steps.”

“GNX” returns in the vein of “DAMN” from 2017 – a mix of menacing, lyrically devastating street fragments and compact, narrative work. He hasn’t lost the scorched earth spirit of beefs with Drake, but now puts that venom into the full widescreen scope of his life and work. His albums take a long time to absorb, but this one also hits with ferocious immediacy.

Here are some early reads on the LP and where it sits in the arc of Lamar’s career. After ‘GNX’, it’s pretty hard to question his claim to be the best rapper in the world.

People walk past a defaced mural of Kendrick Lamar in Compton.

(Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times)

Fix that mural ASAP!

Whoever defaced the Kendrick mural in Compton will likely wake up in surprise because their scribbles inspired the opening salvo for the record. “Wacced Out Murals” opens with the plaintive Spanish vocals of mariachi singer Deyra Barrera (who returns on “reincarnated” and “gloria”), and finds Kendrick exploring how his claim to the title of “best rapper alive” has stirred mixed feelings – “I used to run into ‘Tha Carter III’, I held my Rollie chain proud / Irony, I guess my hard work let Lil Wayne down,” he raps about winning the slot at the Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans that Wayne craved. Yet he promises: “Put that on my children’s children, and then we will see the future first.”

More mustard, but so much Antonoff

After an absolute banger on the level of ‘Not Like Us’, Kendrick would of course return to producer Mustard on an album deeply rooted in West Coast lore. The tense, sultry ‘Hey now’ and the string stabbing ‘tv off’ reprise Mustard’s mix of soul sampling and funk bounce. But it’s striking to see how much Jack Antonoff is spread across this album; the Taylor Swift regular and Bleachers frontman is credited with producing 11 of the 12 songs on “GNX,” the second most behind Kendrick’s longtime producer Sounwave. Antonoff has suddenly become an important part of the Kendrick mythology; he recently worked on the Drake diss “6:16 in LA,” which followed Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle” that roasted Kendrick’s Swift collaborations.

Kendrick Lamar poses in front of his new album ‘GTX’.

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Disrespect Pac? This could be your last stop

If Kendrick was enraged by Drake’s disrespect for AI 2Pac, he fully avenged Pac with “reincarnated,” which flips his 1996 song “Made N-” and absolutely captures Pac’s flow with the care and craft of a lifelong devotee. But the story goes back decades in a kind of past-life regression, as Kendrick imagines other versions of himself in music history, including an evocative verse like “a black woman in the Chitlin’ Circuit… My voice was angelic, direct from heaven. the crowd sobbed… Had everything I wanted, but I couldn’t escape my addiction / Heroin needles had me in the fetal position, confined.”

This is Sam Dew’s breakthrough

The LP doesn’t have many A-list guest features, but basically only features SZA on ‘Luther’ and ‘gloria’. The real discovery for many will be singer-songwriter Sam Dew, an Antonoff and Sounwave collaborator in the band Red Hearse, who brings a velvety texture to seven songs. This should be a huge breakthrough for him. The other credits go to many more underground rappers, including Dody 6, AzChike, Wallie the Sensei, Hitta J3, Peysoh and Young Threat.

The heart pt. 6, Pt. 2

The best pettiness is pretending your nemesis’s music doesn’t exist. Kendrick blew right past Drake’s trollish diss with (almost) the same title with his own new song called ‘heart pt. 6.” The song is generally rich in novelistic details about the early days of Lamar’s career: “When the only goal was to get Jay Rock in the door.” He laments that his success may have complicated his friendships in Black Hippy, and lest anyone think Dave Free’s allegations on Drake’s “Family Matters” confused Kendrick, he reverses a few words here to show just how far they went go back – ‘My n- Dave had a Champagne Acura / A bunch of instrumentals that I freestyled in the passenger… For this little thing of ours we called TDE.