Wake up. Veeze just dropped the year’s best rap album.

This might explain why Veeze suddenly sounds like the most exciting rapper drawing breath this summer, even if his sleepy nonchalance makes “exciting” feel like the wrong word. His voice is a drowsy, dehydrated thing, as if he’s been hitting snooze for 45 minutes after a rough night out. But keep listening and you’ll hear a covert technician who’s figured out how to phrase his lines ahead of the beat while simultaneously slumping into each individual syllable, giving his music a cumulative sense of emergence, momentum and potentiality.

He’s a native of Detroit, home to one of the most vital rap scenes of the past four years, and his new album, “Ganger,” feels like a culmination of his musical community’s sleek inventiveness. Rapping over glassy beats that seem to descend from ancient Detroit techno and electro, he delivers a surge of highly imaginative metaphors in a perpetual sigh, downplaying his scrupulousness with serenity and style. When bragging about a colorful wad of foreign currency, he compares it to an Edible Arrangement. He describes gunfire as “throwing shells like taco food.” Even his breeziest grandiloquence comes freighted with poly-entendres: “Staying fresh to death, I’m a new box of cigarettes.”

He’s clearly a student of hip-hop writ large, something “Ganger” makes clear with its nonstop name-checking. Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Paul Wall, Nelly, Run-DMC and UGK are among the many pantheon fixtures Veeze makes reference to — but, again, listen close. He isn’t doing his homework so much as stealthily trying to transcend it. Throughout “Ganger,” Veeze can sound as dexterous as Lil Wayne in 2006, or as cool as Curren$y in 2010, or as hyper-expressive as Young Thug in 2015, or as wild-stylish as Playboi Carti in 2020. Summoning greatness under his breath, he’s made something quietly immaculate.

For a close reading, cue up “Lick,” an astonishing moment deep in the track list where you might not even notice Veeze’s flood of liquid lyrics until you’re fully submerged. “Pint sealed like my true feelings, stay bottled up,” he raps, comparing a consciousness-altering bottle of codeine to consciousness itself. Then he tosses an infantilizing taunt at a rival: “You’re a kid in my eyes, here’s your sippy cup.” Then, having “soaked up all the game OGs taught us,” he brags about the ability to “waste five thousand like it’s bottled water.” His heart remains true, though. “I ain’t got no hatred in my blood,” he raps, “and I’m thankful for it.”

What a splashdown. And with hip-hop’s 50th anniversary approaching later this summer, it all feels welcome and well-timed — especially with so many older rap fans still worrying that today’s artists have lost respect for their forebears, or that lyricism is dead, or that craft has descended into mumbling, or that this music’s greatest days are gone and irretrievable. “Ganger” is proof that they worry too much. Time to wake up.