The concept album can be the pinnacle of artistic expression on vinyl. Since the height of jazz, through the classic rock era, and into the digital, CD-driven Golden Age of rap; concept albums are the platform on which some of our most celebrated artists asserted their most championed work. Blonde On Blonde, De La Soul Is Dead, The Wall, A Prince Among Thieves, Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814—concept albums that have been widely hailed as landmarks for the artists who produced them, for the periods they defined, and for the genres they helped shape. In Hip-Hop, there are few concept albums as perfectly distilled, as fully realized, and as sonically rich as the debut album from Deltron 3030.

In the late 1990s, Dan The Automator was working with Prince Paul as the alt-rap duo Handsome Boy Modeling School. And Del the Funky Homosapien and Dan were already a little familiar when Del guested on Handsome Boy Modeling School's "Magnetizing" from the duo's eponymous 1999 debut album. "I had worked with Kid Koala also on Handsome Boy Modeling School," Dan explained to INTERVIEW Magazine in 2013. "So I had met him a couple years before that. I think it was Del who had brought the original concept and we said that we should do something—Del had the Deltron Zero character dreamed out in his head. I was like, 'Let’s do this, with Eric as well.'”

"Eric" was/is Eric "Kid Koala" San, the famed turntablist who'd worked with Automator in ...Modeling School and on other projects like Kool Keith's acclaimed debut, Dr. Octagonecologyst.

On Deltron 3030, Del reintroduces himself as the superhero Deltron Zero in the year 3030, and, alongside his partners The Cantankerous Captain Aptos (Dan The Automator) and Skiznod the Boy Wonder (Kid Koala), is traveling the cosmos sparring in interstellar rap battles where his lyrical telekinesis renders opponents vanquished.

But that's just a jumping off point for one of Hip-Hop's most famously verbose wordsmiths to showcase his emcee skills; when one listens to Deltron 3030, it's clear that the loose sci-fi storytelling serves as a backdrop for Del to tackle a number of more grounded topics. Classism runs rampant is this dystopian future, as wealthy overlords oppress the population, forcing Deltron to live underground, literally, in the Bay Area. Interludes like "Meet Cleofis Randal the Patriarch" (which features Steve Berman) and "The News (A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Microsoft, Inc.)" don't push the narrative forward inasmuch as they accentuate the album's underlying theme; Hip-Hop's appropriation and commodification will be it's downfall.

"I think that’s just my manner of looking at stuff. I’m just a dark person, I guess," Del explained. "Dan was the person that was like, “You getting too dark. Let’s have something over here that’s a little bit lighter, something over here to pick it up a little bit.” If it was me, I wouldn’t care. Just straight to hell. Heavy metal. Dan offered that other little balance, and Koala did too."

The thumping boom-bap of "Things You Can Do" is one of the album's highlights, as Del leans into his otherworldly lyricism and Dan's production (anchored by a stellar sample of "What Can The Matter Be?" by the Poppy Family) is sinister but warm, and the song is one of the album's most important narrative-wise, establishing Deltron's powers and his predicament. "Algieun" by Johnny Olivo is the bedrock for the elegant "Mastermind," another one of the best songs here, and a highlight for both Del and Dan.

The Automator gives Del a musical backdrop that manages to sound both futuristic and uniquely soulful; a dynamic and dramatic patchwork that plucks snippets from everywhere; Dan The Automator's gift for sampling is on delightful display as he plunders De La Soul, and more rare inspirations like Robin Armstrong's "Nuclear War 1984" and Canadian psych-poppers the Poppy Family; Euro-prog act Aphrodite's Child and disco legend Cerrone.

The chemistry of the principles is evident throughout Deltron 3030. Obviously, Del and Dan seemed destined to find each other musically.

"I mean we’re both in the Bay Area," Dan said in 2013. "So we probably knew a little bit about each other before we started working together. I originally got Del to work with us on Handsome Boy Modeling School, he did a couple songs on there and Del has always been one of my favorite rappers because he approaches it his own way, which kind matches in a sense to what I do because I approach it in my own way. Then, we got together and we’re all doing it our own way, and it works out pretty well. I mean, it could not work out, but it happens to work out."

Deltron 3030 has never been easy to define, as an album or as a group. The trio wouldn't officially reunite for 13 years after their stellar debut, for their sophomore effort, the aptly titled Event 2. They got so much right the first time around, one could forgive them for not wanting to go back to the well. And they bucked attempts to categorize what they were doing as "alternative" or otherwise.

"But when you’re dealing with a commodity and something selling, you have to have some kind of label so that when people go to a store to look for it they can find it," Dan The Automator conceded in 2013. "So that’s the dilemma. Or if you want to talk about it in discussion, you have to boil it down to some kind of labeling just to be able to have a discussion about it.  But I don’t think that labels should be abused. I think sometimes people abuse labels and they get lazy and they want to stereotype stuff."

Deltron 3030 was born of the imagination of Del the Funky Homosapien and fully realized by the musical genius of The Automator and Kid Koala. Years after it blasted off into intergalactic infamy, the project was recognized as being somewhat prescient in it's commentary.

"Some of the stuff that he’s talking about, which was just projections at the time, have actually come to pass since then," Kid Koala said in 2014. "I’m not saying he’s a prophet or anything, but there was an Orwellian style of writing this, where he just connected the dots, synthesizing everything he was seeing on the news and reading about."