Anyone who has listened to a Gary Clark Jr. album or watched the four-time Grammy Award winner perform live knows that he’s a gifted multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and performer. And never more so than on his last album, 2019’s illuminating This Land. But while This Land signaled a breakthrough in displaying his musical versatility beyond the blues, his latest album, JPEG RAW, represents a quantum leap.

“Blues will always be my foundation,” says Clark. “But that’s just scratching the surface. I’m also a beat maker and an impressionist who likes to do different voices. I’ve always loved theater and being able to tell a story. At home when I play the trumpet, I think Lee Morgan, or John Coltrane when I play the sax. I’ve even got bagpipes just in case I need them. So while this is my most honest and vulnerable album about relating to the human condition, it’s also the most freeing.”

At once powerful, insightful and thought-provoking, JPEG RAW picks up where This Land left off. But unlike its predecessor, Clark’s fourth studio album was born out of an unprecedented two years during which the country was rocked by a global pandemic, coast-to-coast civil rights protests following the murder of George Floyd and a political insurrection staged inside the nation’s capitol. As a Black man and father concerned about the future for his three young children in a still challenging climate, Clark found himself back in the studio recording a personal call-to-action that’s compelling both musically and lyrically.

“When the album sequencing was finished, the band and I realized that we’d made an album into a movie,” he recalls. “That’s what I was going for sonically because that’s how the whole writing process played out. First, it’s about angst and confusion, the unknown. Next, it’s about looking at ourselves internally. And then it’s about what comes after: the hope and triumph.”

And as you listen to JPEG RAW unfold, those three distinct transitions in tone, mood and intention urgently resonate. The curtain rises on the 12-song set with the loud, chaotic “Maktub.” Named after the Arabic word meaning fate or destiny, the track outlines the first phase of the album’s mission statement as Clark’s aggressive guitar paints the picture: “So we gotta move in the same direction / We gotta move / Time for a new revolution / We gotta move.”

The album’s title track — an acronym for Jealousy, Pride, Envy, Greed … Rules, Alter Ego, Worlds — examines the role cell-phone society plays in this chaos at the expense of real-life, one-on-one interaction. At one point in the song, he decries the fact that “my boy just can’t walk around in the store with the hoodie hoodie / They gon be watching you like lookie lookie.”

“I don’t love having a mobile device,” explains Clark of the song’s origin and the album’s overarching theme. “I miss being able to have more genuine interaction, looking someone in the eyes and learning something, getting a perspective. JPEG RAW is about showing the real and not the edit. We live in a world of edits, filters and redos. We only get one shot.”