Big epochal shifts in pop music are supposed to feel like monumental takeovers — the guard not only changing but being forcefully usurped, wars declared on old ways and styles until a clean break with tradition can be fully made. And yet the album that revealed Missy and Timbaland as the architects of an entirely new and unexpected approach to both hip-hop and R&B has so many routes into its world that it feels less like something being overthrown and more like an abrupt evolutionary sidestep into an alternate universe. Funk and soul tradition still linger in Tim’s future-fixated sound, but as talismans for next-phase evolutions; the Ann Peebles homage that provides the album its titular cool is just the most direct reward of a lineage that went upstream from Memphis to Minneapolis via Mothership. (And then beyond there to destinations unknown; what musical tradition did that bird-warbling android-beatbox hydraulic-booty “Beep Me 911” groove even come from?) And Elliott’s emerging presence as a new kind of double-threat singer-slash-rapper rides on her nearly unmatched ability to not only strike the ideal balance between pure lyricism and absurdist chaos, but make those elements feel codependent. Perfectly situated somewhere between club-system floor-filler and headphone stoner symphony, few albums of its time have felt so amazingly declarative in its “this is the future” turf-stake while also being so relatively chill and joyously welcoming.