From its opening announcement ("It's a cold world out there ...") to its last breath, Cannibal Ox's only proper album genuinely chills the blood. A constant, captivating struggle between the sinister, weary realism of the duo's gritty New York City streets, and high-flown psychedelic allegories, the metaphors are surprising, rich and devastating; pigeons who eat pizza crusts but would rather "expand their wings and hover over greater things".

With spidery lyrical intricacy, the duo Vordul Mega and Vast Aire describe an over-described city in a way more scathing, and somehow more loving, than ever before. The staccato delivery of "little. black. girl. got. shot." has the deadpan scansion of a newspaper billboard, while at the other end of the spectrum – and the record – we have the desperate, sky-scraping escapism of Scream Phoenix. Vast in particular sounds like the personification of a city and a civilisation at the end of its tether.

The beats underscoring this millenarian despair, by Def Jux supremo El-P, went beyond anything he'd ever achieved before, matching the teary ambition and Blade Runner-esque melancholia of the rhymes. "In the beginning there was no sin/We in the ninth inning, and I'm God body trying to win" Vast spits through mechanised gospel wails – this is the true soundtrack for the end times. Cannibal Ox never matched their debut – and nor did anyone else. Forget Nas, forget Tupac, forget Public Enemy: rap does not get better than The Cold Vein.

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