It is rare for an artist to break into the music scene but not release a studio album for more than three years. It is rarer still for that first studio album to hit the iTunes top three—and Azealia Banks proves to be that exception. Her debut album, Broke with Expensive Taste, dropped almost unannounced on Nov. 6, nearly three years after she first began working on it. The long wait was more than worth it, as Banks is breaking onto the rap scene at a moment when the most popular female performer is Iggy Azaela, an Australian who thinks she can rap. Banks not only runs circles around Azaela but brings new competition to Nicki Minaj, one of the most charted and decorated female rap artists in the United States.

Broke With Expensive Taste is more than just a debut rap album, though, as Banks is more than just a rap artist. She trained in musical theater at the prestigious LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan and performed in a number of off-Broadway musicals as a teenager. She is openly bisexual, one of the few artists in the genre who has come out of the closet. But she is more than her sexuality or her musical background. Banks raps with the big boys and she can easily keep up with them.

Part of what makes the songs so interesting is how she combines her fast rap, filled to the brim with obscenity and clever wordplay, with a more pop styling. Banks, in the song “Jfk,” swiftly raps the verses, backed up by Theophilius London. London, a more established performer, serves to highlight Banks’ own skills, including her ability to sing her own choruses (rather than hiring another pop star to do them for her).

However, no song can highlight Banks’s talent like her hit single “212,” originally released in 2011 and placed squarely in the middle of Broke With Expensive Taste’s track list. There’s a reason “212” is her best-known song. It’s fast and catchy with a beat just made for dancing. But what makes “212” so fun and just so impressive is the ease with which Banks raps and the cleverness in the rhymes she creates. The chorus is centered on a slang term for female genitalia. Banks builds up to the explicit word with a verse filled with quick one-liners filled with the vowels and sounds similar to that word, such as “See I remember you when you were/The young new face /But you do like to/Slumber don’t you?/Now your boo up too hun.”

Another song, “Ice Princess,” is a clever play on words and themes. The song begins with whistling winds and a soft tinkling noise, evocative of a winter storm and jingle bells or icicles tapping against each other. It is loaded with wintery imagery that still manages to work into stereotypical rap themes of wealth and power. She makes a pun on her last name while bringing up the materialism that can be so prevalent in pop culture with the line “They call me Banks ’cause I can loan money” and compares diamonds to glaciers and a cold December, a metaphor most people would never think of.

At times, Broke With Expensive Taste can seem almost disjointed, as Banks mixes genres, background beats, speed and volume. No two songs on the album sound the same, but that is what makes it so much fun. She can go from the fast, pop “Chasing Time” that features her own vocals during the non-rapped sections and more Taylor Swift-esque lyrics like “Cause I’m born to dance in the moonlight/I feel like spending my nights alone” to the soft and slow “Luxury,” in which it sounds like she is whispering for much of the song. The two songs sound nothing alike, but one still seemingly flows into the next.

Broke With Expensive Taste does not sound like a 23-year-old’s debut album. Banks’s confidence and talents blows her older competition out of the water. With her expletive-laced lyrics, catchy choruses and ability to fire off syllables of clever wordplay, Banks exudes confidence and talent, and I personally cannot wait for her to release another album.