Edmonton rapper Cadence Weapon’s Afterparty Babies has perhaps the best album cover of the year so far. It’s an unadorned shot of the MC and 40 of his 20-something peers posing, class-photo-style, in an Edmonton bar called the Black Dog. In 50 years, anyone who still owns the record will refer to it to recall what young adults actually looked like in 2008—basically, overgrown teenagers. The album’s music, too, will serve as a dependable time capsule, documenting the media-saturated, digital-based lifestyles of today’s young and restless.

Cadence Weapon (born Rollie Pemberton) renders his peers as a confused but lovable lot, people who connect more closely to each other via the Internet than in person. According to Pemberton, he wants to do for his generation—specifically, for his Edmonton contemporaries—exactly what Lou Reed did for the freaks and outcasts of Manhattan in the 1970s.

“I’m very influenced by the songs Lou Reed wrote about the people he knew in New York City, the people on the street buying drugs or just hanging out, the kind of people you see every day,” says the rapper, reached at his home in the Alberta capital.

“He would take these people that were just innocuous everyday people and make them sound like stars. It gave an importance to the average person that’s lacking in a lot of art. For example, you’ll have this new band from some small town in the States, and they’ll call themselves Berlin. People seem to be on this constant search for the exotic; I’m doing the opposite of that.”

Calling himself, with no shame, a “hipster historian”, Cadence Weapon fills Afterparty Babies with stories based on his and his friends’ experiences, variously describing what it’s like to be a struggling nightclub promoter (“Unsuccessful Club Nights”), what happens to people when gentrification hits a historic neighbourhood (“Real Estate”), and how it feels to be a rapper who spends half his life on the road (“Do I Miss My Friends?”).

Formerly a rap critic for Pitchfork, Cadence is a wordy rapper in the tradition of indie MCs like Aesop Rock, but on Afterparty Babies—for which he produced most of the tracks—the Albertan stays out of the way of the music, punching up the beat rather than overwhelming it. This strategy yields a newfangled version of what used to be called hip-house—metric raps set to the kind of hectic pulse that recalls England’s Basement Jaxx.

“A lot of reviews I’ve read say the production is quite repetitive, but I think maybe the critics don’t understand the purpose of a certain kind of music,” he explains. “It’s the same thing as a Bob Dylan song that’s 10 minutes long that has a repetitive motif going throughout, or a house track that’s based on a bass line, a kick drum, and a single riff. That’s the sort of hypnotic effect I’m going for. These are the sort of songs that might seem strange if you only listen to music on your iPod, but that make complete sense when you hear them in a nightclub.”

Cadence Weapon plays the Commodore Ballroom on Wednesday (May 7).