Psychedelic Meet-Cute

 A new Kid Cudi album, launched in moving color.

- CRAIG JENKINS

KID CUDI'S WORK has always felt cinematic in scope percussive, kinetic, and spontaneous, an expression of motion as much as pure sound. Obsessed with space, he crafts compositions with cosmic heft. On his studio debut from 2009, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, he blended personal reflection and narrative interludes into a dream like concept album; a year later, on Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager, he peered down dark hallways of drug use and self-loathing.

Lately, it might seem that the Cleveland-born fashion and music impresario has grown less interested in his own album-making process in a way that has threatened to stifle future endeavors. But that's because he has been hard at work on Entergalactic, his eighth album and a new Netflix animated film of the same name. They were released at the same time as two halves of a project that challenged him to employ all his gifts.

Cudi is billing Entergalactic as his first musical, and it works as a realization of ideas he has touched on since year one. Named after an End of Day cut about eating 'shrooms and pondering the infinite alongside a woman you like, it recounts the tale of a couple nudged together by fate and learning to set aside their reservations. The album glides through songs about letting go of fear and enjoying the moment, while the film plants Cudi in the role of the doe-eyed Jabari, an artist hired to revitalize a storied comic-book company. (The series that Bari comes up with is based on Mr. Rager, the persona Cudi adopted for his second album.) Moving into a lush Tribeca building, he meets Meadow (voiced by Jessica Williams), a photographer whose tastes for art, music, weed, and vegan food make her a fine foil to his ex, Carmen, an NYU grad whose bedroom walls and Instagram page are covered in chipper motivational sayings.