At once forceful and supremely intelligent, Aesop Rock’s third major release, “Bazooka Tooth,” has succeeded in bringing new life to a subset of hip-hop drowning in lyrical and musical conventions made stale by years of overuse.

“That’s kind of like the most fun for me,” Aesop said. “You know, from a production standpoint, I like to layer things up. I really like taking sounds and styles from different time periods and being able to have a guitar recorded in the ’60s with an ’80s snare.”

Using sounds as divergent as carnival song clips, nearly subsonic bass lines and robotic blips, Aesop has succeeded in branching out from traditional underground hip-hop. But he has still remained true to age-old rap ethics and aesthetics learned from years of freestyling and do-it-yourself production, even while pushing the hip-hop envelope.

“I definitely am trying to do something new and original, but it’s not necessarily in relation to what’s accepted. I know my sound may not be the most accessible to everyone, but that doesn’t interest me as much as having something that is very original without being pretentious,” he said. “It’s kind of B-boy rule number one to be original. I want to try to have some original B-boy s–t that’s still obviously rap and obviously raw and obviously rooted in the same place as whatever my pioneers did, but has its own sound, has its own thing.”

Though not as uniformly themed as “Labor Days” – Aesop’s second album that explored work and production – “Bazooka Tooth” is stylistically coherent, as Aesop has treated this album differently than the age-old formula of fitting one’s rhymes over pre-produced beats.

“I used to just write and rap, and now it’s kind of a little different from that,” he said. “I used to make songs front to back and then find a beat that matched it and then just record it, and it was done. Lately, I’ve been doing basically everything at the same time. Maybe start with a beat or just a skeleton of a beat and then take scraps of things I’ve written and try and piece them together and put a verse together.”

It is this holistic approach that helps his tracks – each of which show an intricate balance between vocals and beats – come together into solid albums.

“I just try and build a bunch of songs all at once and just keep going back over the course of a few months to see how it’s fitting and what I want to change. I like doing it this way – writing songs inside out rather than front to back.”

And inside out, the record holds up. Rather than just strengthening it with filler tracks, guest artists and meaningless intros and outros, Aesop has, from start to finish, bolstered his wit and flow style with tasteful production (much of it his own), and a polish that does not subtract from his indie roots or the ferocity of his delivery.

“Bazooka Tooth” has evolved from the macabre stylings of “Labor Days” into a soundscape as varied and multifaceted as the samples and layers Aesop drenches each track in, with his characteristically bizarre vocals still at the heart.

“Pretty much nothing I say is a grammatically correct sentence,” he said. “I think over the course of many years of rapping, I find it interesting to find ways to put words together that maybe aren’t necessarily a sentence, but when you say them, it still means something – it possibly means something that you weren’t able to get from a grammatically correct sentence, with your little subject and predicate.

“You know, there’s rhyme involved, but there’s alliteration,” he said. “Other interesting things – like little word play issues and how you stack words next to each other – are still important as much as what you’re writing about. It’s fun to find sentences or phrases that kind of slip off of the tongue in a weird way and catches your ear in a way that immediately you know you’ve never heard that grouping of words in that way before. I like when a few words in a row will be kind of abrasive to your ear.”

The Bazooka Tooth Tour – which includes performances by labelmates Murs and Mr. Lif and locals S.A. Smash – comes to Little Brother’s at 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $15 and are available through Ticketmaster and at the door the day of show.