"Yeezus," Kanye West's Raw and Jolting New Album Lucas Jackson/Reuters Kanye West's new album, "Yeezus," is due out this week. Kanye West's sixth solo album, "Yeezus," starts with a long, vicious electronic zap, a saw-toothed sound that slides up and down octaves before making way for a distorted synthesizer riff and a ticking, hissing beat. It's an aggressive demand for attention, as if Mr. West needs still more of it. A career-long oscillation between brilliance and folly, strategic self-consciousness and wacky impulsiveness, has made Mr. West hip-hop's most visible and polarizing figure. "Soon as they like you make "em un-like you," he boasts. He's a consistently startling producer and a hardworking, high-concept performer. He's also a loose cannon at awards shows, on social media and in interviews - and, as of Saturday, the father of a child with another media magnet, Kim Kardashian. And because from the beginning he has had more on his mind than simple braggadocio, his every move and utterance are fodder not only for tabloids but also for academics. "Yeezus" (Def Jam) arrives with all eyes and ears on Mr. West. When the album leaked before its Tuesday release date - as most albums do - it stirred up a Twitter frenzy and got widespread news coverage. Mr. West's response to all that scrutiny is an album that stays as combative as its opening zap. "A monster about to come alive again," he announces in the opening track, "On Sight." The music hurls Mr. West's rhymes like a catapult, an effect compounded by his vehement delivery. But the sound and attitude often say more than the actual words. Mr. West has demolished the production style that made him a major commercial force as both producer and rapper. As he bragged when he performed on June 9 at the Governors Ball Music Festival, "Yeezus" isn't geared for radio play. If its jolting production didn't keep it off the air, its onslaught of four-letter words might. The pop-friendly snippets that Mr. West used to sample and turn into hooks, and the smoothly swelling, richly orchestrated, proudly eclectic productions he often built around them, have been drastically cut back. Collaborating with Daft Punk (on four of the album's 10 songs) and other producers, Mr. West often lets a lone, low, nasty synthesizer line drive verse after verse, revitalizing the punk-minded electronica of industrial bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails and rave bands like the Prodigy. He's pivoting away from the triumphal fanfares and plush chords of Top-40 hip-hop to his version - with better equipment - of the bleak homemade tracks coming out of places like Mr. West's hometown, Chicago; another collaborator on this album is the teenage Chicago rapper Chief Keef. The tracks on "Yeezus" are raw and bumpy, with the arbitrary whims of a studio despot. As if to prove he's in control, or that he's not skimping on the budget, Mr. West often jump-cuts into disconnected interludes, including choirs or orchestrations that might have run throughout a whole song on previous albums. Deploying anything from a Hungarian progressive-rock band to the rasp of dancehall, the album is one long, efficient, inventive kick in the head. Mr. West is angry, all right. In "Black Skinhead" he snarls, "I've been a menace for the longest/But I ain't finished, I'm devoted," over a track that switches between a blunt glam-rock drumbeat and a distorted synthesizer line. In "New Slaves" he's furious at the segregation his mother's generation faced, at corporations trying to control him, at profit-making prisons, at the media (of course) and - after many songs on previous albums that proudly itemized his collection of designer clothes - at the way designer labels are marketed to those who can't afford them. Those were the songs he introduced on "Saturday Night Live" in the initial promotional salvo for "Yeezus," and they cast the album in its best light: Mr. West as a point man for the dispossessed and the stereotyped. Like "Watch the Throne," the 2011 album he made with Jay-Z, "Yeezus" is acutely conscious of race and of what Mr. West sees as resentment of black achievement. Sometimes he responds with reminders of his own success, as he does in "I Am a God"; the song starts with a hilarious over-the-top list of celebrity perks - "Hurry up with my damn massage/Hurry up with my damn ménage/Get the Porsche out the damn garage" - and goes on to tout his résumé. Although he plays down the designer clothes on "Yeezus," he still manages to work in half a dozen references to luxury cars. And throughout the album, in songs like "On Sight" and "I'm in It," he also pumps up another black stereotype: the insatiable superstud, callous and lewd, using and discarding women, sometimes with a little blasphemy to turn up the shock value. It's not such a major achievement to be more clever than hip-hop's many other raunchmongers. Through the album, Mr. West picks up catchphrases from the 1960s civil rights and black-power movements - "any means necessary," "free at last" - only to apply them to his own celebrity or to bedroom exploits. He exults "free at last" for a woman undressing. One of Mr. West's oldest production trademarks is to raise the pitch of a recognizable song, and on "Yeezus" he does that using Nina Simone's version of "Strange Fruit," the chilling song from the 1930s about a lynching. Her austere piano ballad, with Mr. West's voice computer-tuned into a melody, gives way to a dirge driven by repeated hornlike notes. With the profound history of "Strange Fruit" and the bitter clarity of Mr. West's new sound, "Blood on the Leaves" could be a perfect setting for a manifesto on race and justice, a sequel to Mr. West's songs like "Jesus Walks." But it's not: the lyrics are about a hookup at a party, an affair destroyed by "the limelight" and, one more time, alimony (a subject Mr. West handled with far more panache years ago in "Gold Digger"). It's a rehash, a squandered opportunity. No one is expecting Mr. West to turn into a latter-day Public Enemy, making political statements as a full-time mission. He, and we, are rightly fascinated by the limelight, by the culture of consumption and by Mr. West's endlessly contradictory reactions to all that attention. But now that he's transfigured his music, his words await an upgrade to match.