Nas’ string of six albums with producer Hit-Boy is anything but late work – it’s the best period of his career. King’s Disease II is every bit as great as King’s Disease but in a different way. It’s not as compressed, and allows Nas to lean into his sinuous silky side, the melancholy that lurks around the edge of all his work, except that it’s now shorn of even the most residual hubris and sentimentality of his second era output. There’s a mournful plaintive edge to King’s Disease II that verges on full-blown depression time and time again, only for the album, and Nas, to wrest himself from it with moments of exquisite beauty.

King’s Disease II is also Nas’ first album with a fully-formed trap sensibility, at least over several of the opening tracks. Sandwiched amongst them, provocatively, is “EPMD 2,” a track the features the legacy titular hip hop outfit and Eminem, who puts in one of the best appearances of his late career. In a single jaw-dropping flow, Eminem returns to the cadence of his classic era, always on the verge of the signature upward inflection that never comes, leaving him free-floating in the middle of the track, like a signifier that has been jettisoned from any referentiality.

While the trap touches are novel they serve mainly to re-energise Nas’ own sensibility, which blooms with two of my favourite tracks on the album, “Nobody” and “Moments.” On “Nobody,” Nas imagines this new-but-familiar version of himself as his West Coast persona, as he describes his longing to be in a city where he is anonymous, after an earlier anecdote about Dr. Dre welcoming him to LA. Lauryn Hill’s rapping on this track is one of the highlights of the album. As with Eminem, Nas knows how to draw the best from his guests here.

“Moments” is just as good. At first this feels like a throwback to the cheesier side of Nas’ persona, as he lists important life moments – “Taking trainin’ wheels off the rims, Movin’ in ya first crib or having your first kid.” Just as the song is on the verge of becoming completely anodyne and basic, Nas shifts it with a wry and playful flex, turning his own rap career into the most important of these moments: “Moments you can’t relive, Like your first time buggin’ from somethin’ that Nas said.” It’s a turn that at once parodies Nas’ nostalgia for his heyday, affirms his ongoing relevance in the present, and keeps him humble in the midst of this incredible string of albums.

The second half of King’s Disease II is just as beautiful. Nas’ gift for pairing smoothness and exquisite beauty has rarely reached these heights. On “No Phony Love” he romances a woman by putting on D’Angelo late at night; elsewhere he references Anita Baker’s Rapture. And “Composure,” the third last track, which features Hit-Boy, contains the most soulful outro of his career since “Life’s a Bitch.” With a terrific two-minute closer, “Nas is Good,” the album ends on the same notes of concision and precision as King’s Disease, while managing to expand, experiment and luxuriate even more along the way. Masterful.