Schoolboy Q (No 1,193)

Hometown: Los Angeles.

The lineup: Quincy Matthew Hanley (vocals).

The background: "If the Weeknd donned a gangsta persona and was from Los Angeles, you'd have Schoolboy Q," went one review of Habits & Contradictions, the second album by the LA rapper, which was enough to make us want to hear it. After all, we spent 2011 bleeding the life out of that deathless debut Weeknd mixtape and its velveteen vampire blues, and we're hungry for more. Not that Schoolboy Q, a 25-year-old former drug dealer and gang member, operates in quite the same realm as Abel Tesfaye, whose songs about Wicked Games in exclusive apartments under the influence of expensive narcotics always seemed to us to be illusory, theoretical, a high-concept album about the high-life. If House of Balloons offered a dark fantasy, Habits & Contradictions is far more rooted in reality.

So instead of Tesfaye's seraphic warble, Hanley offers earthier, gruffer tones: you get the impression, considering the casual sexism and more conventional machismo on display here, that the rarefied, stylised and feminised would be unacceptable in his world. But there is, on H&C, plenty of downbeat dolour evidenced on many recent hip-hop records, the sort of post-Drake navel-gazing that has recently divided music critics. Of course, being fans of post-Drake navel-gazing and his brand of stoned, crepuscular sorrow, we couldn't be happier.

Actually, we could be. Habits & Contradictions isn't as relentless in its miserablism as Aubrey or Abel. If anything, it reminds us of Harlem's finest Houston-rap impressionist, A$AP Rocky, and Hanley seems to agree: A$AP makes a cameo on a track called Hands on the Wheel, where the pair find a pleasing middle ground between anguish and aggression. As with Schoolboy Q's debut album, 2011's Setbacks, Hanley follows that classic hip-hop lineage of artists combining murderous lyrics with mellifluous music. But there has been a progression: whereas on Setbacks, close to a mixtape, the songs were mainly based on our kind of symphonic soul and samples and snatches of noir-ish movie scores. On this follow-up, released last week in the States, there is more original music, and the production is more interesting. And although, in his lyrics, the former member of street gang the Hoover Crips draws on his real-world struggles and has quotidian epiphanies about hypocrisy and injustice, Schoolboy Q is at his best when he rises above the mundane and creates an atmosphere every bit as ravishing and unreal as the Weeknd, from the intoxicating sadness and torpid dolour of How We Feeling to the homicidal menace of Raymond 1969.

The buzz: "If the Weeknd donned a gangsta persona and was from Los Angeles, you'd have Schoolboy Q" – The Sermon's Domain.

The truth: File between P for poignant and R for remorse.

Most likely to: Become our latest habit.

Least likely to: Work with Quincy Jones.

What to buy: Habits & Contradictions is available on iTunes.

File next to: Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, Curren$y, the Weekend.

Links: twitter.com/#!/schoolboyq.

Thursday's new band: Jodie Marie.