Until now, Jaboukie Young-White had been known for a specific set of skills––namely, making people think and laugh out loud, albeit in various ways. Once a golden prince of Twitter, or whatever we’re supposed to call it now, Jaboukie was at the vanguard of iconic, mic-drop type posts, some so disruptive they got him temporarily banned. He’s also a gifted standup comic and a talented comedic actor whose stolen scene after scene in shows including Only Murders in the Building and Rap Sh!t. He has only ever seemed super confident and unflinchingly self-assured in every one of those formats. This is why it’s slightly surprising to hear that his latest project had him feeling a type of way.

“I definitely [had anxieties],” he tells BET.com about All Who Can't Hear Must Feel, his debut solo album, out Aug. 25. “Even just when I was telling people I’m working on music, I got a lot of, ‘Oh!,’” he says via Zoom from his Brooklyn apartment, making the kind of polite but slightly shady face one makes when, say, a kid hands you a hideous drawing. “But, coming from a place of having silenced myself, shrunk myself, ignored parts of myself, tried to kill off parts of myself, just to appease other people, the silver lining is that I'm kind of allergic to doing that again.”

Jaboukie says music has always been a passion––although one he’s kept private until now. All Who Can't Hear Must Feel came to be almost on a dare; when an exec at Interscope learned Jaboukie was making music, the exec asked if he was interested in releasing music. “I couldn't not do it,” he says. “I was just thinking, if I'm looking back on my life, and I think about the time that I could have just went for it and didn’t, I would regret it.”

The regret wouldn't have been one-sided. All Who Can't Hear Must Feel is deeply satisfying, a blend of club-ready bangers, tender and thoughtful tunes, and future-sounding provocative cuts that push culture forward. One inspiration, he says, was Azealia Banks’ 2015 album Broke With Expensive Taste, the iconoclastic rapper’s renegade album that blended house, punk, UK garage; that album, Jaboukie says, “was so visionary and just so unafraid to show her full creative self.”  All Who Can't Hear Must Feel similarly feels unorthodox and unrestrained but sophisticated and thoughtful. Take, for example, “Not Me Tho,” a bouncy, upbeat, trap-influenced jam, the video for which has Jaboukie vamping around Manhattan, particularly the Financial District, in a dress, heels, and lipstick.

The track, he says, is about pushing back on the mythology of the ‘American Dream’ –– challenging the notion that hard work equates to success; in the video, he walks a treadmill as a visual representation of the rat race/hamster wheel workers often feel they’re walking. “I think, increasingly, it's becoming more obvious that hard work does not guarantee safety; so much of it is down to circumstances outside of oneself. And I think it requires a high level of delusion, to keep believing that.”

On the house-inspired bop “BBC,” the openly gay creative toys with the language often employed on hookup apps to make a statement. “I was like, ‘Oh, bad bitch coochie, that's BBC.’ I thought that the subversion of the traditional hypermasculine machismo association with [the term] was funny.” And “LA,” a sonic hard veer left that has a decidedly ‘60s, psychedelic rock sound, was born of sorrow; estranged from his father, Jaboukie hasn’t been back to his childhood Chicago home for years, and wrote the song after learning his beloved dog had died. “I was just so devastated,” he says. “And then on top of that just kind of thinking about past relationships, what it means to experience heartbreak and what it means to be going through these relationship throws.”

All Who Can't Hear Must Feel comes from a saying he heard growing up rooted in his Jamaican heritage. “It’s kind of a multi-layered reference to a bunch of things. On the nose, you have the reference to like, ‘Stop crying before I give you something to cry about,’ but in a more subtle way, a lot of the dancehall music I grew up listening to is so bass driven. So much of this project I really loaded up the low so it was kind of acknowledging that in a literal sonic sense.”

The title also alludes to his current state of being. Approaching 30, Jaboukie feels more confident and confident expressing vulnerability and revealing unseen sides of himself than ever; the things he’s had to hear and feel shaped a new frame of mind.

“At the time I was making this project, I was learning so many hard lessons,” he says, “and coming to realize things that in the moment maybe I wasn't fully aware of or lessons that I wasn't aware that I was learning. I got perspective on a lot of things. This comes from a place of love. I've always been a music nerd, so being able to make it and share it with people at the level that I'm doing it, it’s really cool.”