Jelly Roll’s cameo on the Tech N9ne cut “EF U (Easier For You)” in 2019 couldn’t have arrived at a better time in the Nashville rapper’s career. Not only did the high-profile collaboration serve as proof that his star was on the rise, but it also led to a distribution deal with Tech’s Strange Music, an indie hip-hop institution whose commercial success has been profiled in publications like The Wall Street Journal. Strange Music wound up working on just two Jelly Roll albums, A Beautiful Disaster and Self Medicated, before he landed his first major-label contract. Yet both were critical successes that helped pave the way for the artist’s bold leap to country (albeit with a rock twist) in 2021. Make no mistake, the somber and spare A Beautiful Disaster is still a hip-hop set. The MC’s rhymes are responsible for the heavy lifting. But his growing confidence as a singer brings ballads like “Bottle and Mary Jane” and “Creature” to life. The biggest changes heard on A Beautiful Disaster can be found in Jelly Roll’s emotional tenor. Had he recorded the gloomy “Nothing Left At All” several years earlier, he would have sounded far angrier with the demons that keep him up at night. Instead, he sits with them, trying to understand what they’re saying about his life. “Alone in thought, I stand and dwell,” he ponders. “I’m the go-to guy, so who do I go to when I need some help?” For Jelly Roll, the answer is increasingly family. On “Suicide,” arguably his most tender love song to date, the rapper speaks directly to his wife: “You’re the calm to my storm when I feel upset/You help every time that I feel depressed.” Even more telling is “Tears Could Talk,” a duet with his daughter, Bailee Ann, that uncovers their shared pain. If it sounds as if Jelly Roll has gone emo, that’s not far off. Up to this point in his career, his music had been generally tagged as Southern hip-hop or, in the case of his Waylon & Willie collaborations with Struggle Jennings, country rap. But the wounded honesty, crawling tempos, and muted arrangements all over A Beautiful Disaster sympathize more with emo rap than Dirty South. There’s no bravado, and surely no swagger, only vulnerability.