Have you ever met someone you exclusively knew through the internet, and they turn out to be nothing like you imagined? The funny thing about our online personae is that they’re just that: an idealized version of ourselves we choose to present to others. The fact that we spend so much time crafting our digital personality seems absurd, but it makes sense. Our normal selves are mostly boring.

Thus is the paradox of Dean Blunt. The London artist has been called everything from elusive and shadowy to brutally honest and straightforward. Just about the only thing accurate to say about Dean Blunt is that no one really ever knows what the fuck is going on with him. Last year he released an achingly open-faced album in The Redeemer followed up with an album called Каменный Oстров released on an obscure Russian blog. So you can understand the confusion.

And now we have Black Metal. In many aspects it’s a natural continuation of The Redeemer in its emotional (ahem) bluntness, like much of his post-Hype Williams work has been. “50 Cent” flips its masculine-loaded title with a downtrodden, sad duet in which he whines, “Why want a girl that doesn’t want me back?” Which is easy to get on board with—who can’t relate with a little bit of unrequited love? Flip to the B-side of Black Metal where things get weirder: “Hush” throws around lines like, “Your batty’s so hot,” and, “You know you wanna leave with a G.” It’s like an abstract boy who cried wolf: it’s hard to get people to take you seriously when you bounce from depressive folk-pop that samples The Pastels to Ritalin-induced rap.

Not to fault Dean Blunt on this—I find a lot of the blame in “missing the point” on the listener, myself included. Because of his propensity for befuddling antics, Blunt can be a frustrating character to track sometimes. It’s like when someone whose entire persona is built around sarcasm finally says something sincere. Hesitancy is justified, right? Or maybe the funhouse grime of “Hush” and “Grade” is a defensive plot to deflect focus from the honesty of a song like “Molly & Aquafina” where he sings, “Because you’ll never be / The one I want you to be / Because I know that person is me.” But then again, the line after that is, “Riding through these streets / I’m strapped up with my Nina.”

So with Black Metal Dean Blunt has either painted himself into a corner, or herded an entire fanbase into a pen like sheep. What we’ve come to expect from him is secrecy, eccentricity, and unpredictability. So with two or three albums in a row mostly comprised of off-kilter adult contemporary, why is it still so confounding? Our 2014 reality is that normalcy is antagonistic, and sincerity even moreso when we consider black male musicians. Blunt has been constantly challenging these ideas with his solo work since he split with Inga Copeland. The fact that Black Metal is so puzzling doesn’t make it any less fascinating in that regard.

Black Metal is out now via Rough Trade.