At What Cost is GoldLink’s coming of age story. The grief, joys and tragedies of an artist who wants to be something bigger than himself for a city he deeply cares about — even if it sometimes doesn’t seem to care for him. Interwoven in his story is also a celebration and eulogy of a D.C. that has gradually disappeared: a city once affectionately known as the nation’s “Chocolate City,” now not so much, and with that an erasure of Black history, music and spaces that people are trying to keep alive.

All of this culminates in what is still GoldLink’s most ambitious endeavor to date: an album that posits the question “At what cost?” to shed light on a D.C. that’s much different than the one it is now.