“Ask me something, even when it’s painful,” Sadie Dupuis sings on “Rabbit Rabbit,” the fifth album by her band Speedy Ortiz.

The lyric was, partially, a message to herself. After greater than a decade of writing songs and poetry — in addition to portray her personal album covers — Dupuis, 35, discovered that she was asking herself ever extra insistently about deep childhood trauma and her personal survival mechanisms.

“There have been points of my previous that I used to be working by means of for the primary time on this file,” she mentioned through video from her pink-walled (from lengthy earlier than “Barbie”) dwelling studio in Philadelphia.

Dupuis steered the “pressured stillness” of the pandemic led her to subjects she hadn’t tapped for songwriting earlier than. Because the songs had been rising, she puzzled, “Why do I really feel so uncomfortable once I’m on the precipice of crying? Why am I not in a position to cry in entrance of somebody and even myself?”

In “Cry Cry Cry” — one of many album’s most adventurous songs, with eerie vocal harmonies, sputtering drums and heaving, distorted guitar riffs — she sings, “3 ways to cry, and one is silence/He couldn’t see tears have which means.”

An acoustic guitar and a keyboard had been close by as Dupuis chatted; the closet behind her, she mentioned, was stuffed with results pedals. She was nonetheless sporting a patterned pink jacket and elaborate eye make-up from a photograph shoot earlier that day.

Over the previous decade, Dupuis has been writing songs for Speedy Ortiz that merge cryptic however resonant lyrics with gleefully asymmetrical, guitar-driven rock. Melodies collide with countermelodies; lyrics pose conundrums; choruses maintain altering a phrase or two as they recur. The songs are advanced but surprisingly catchy. Dupuis additionally data on her personal as Sad13, shifting synthesizers upfront and giving her songs extra of a pop sheen.

Dupuis earned an M.F.A. in poetry and has taught artistic writing on the College of Massachusetts at Amherst, and he or she has printed two books of hard-edge, summary poetry. She met the producer of “Rabbit Rabbit,” Sarah Tudzin (who data her personal songs as Illuminati Hotties), when she was giving a studying at a Los Angeles bookstore.

“She’s simply type of an final galaxy-brain genius,” Tudzin mentioned. “Together with her writing and guitar taking part in and manufacturing and every part, it’s true artwork.”

“Rabbit Rabbit,” due Friday, melds personal reckonings and sonic ambitions. Amid careening, dissonant guitar traces and meter-shifting buildings, Dupuis sings — obliquely and generally bluntly — about vulnerability, energy, anger and the way to transfer forward. Within the album’s closing music, “Ghostwriter,” she strives to search out closure: “I’m bored with anger. How do I let go?”

Unexpectedly at first, Dupuis discovered herself writing about “early household stuff,” she defined. “I used to be abused by a member of my household once I was younger, and I wasn’t actually shielded from it,” she mentioned. “My dad was conscious of it, and didn’t intervene. He apologized for it, very near when he handed away. But it surely felt like there have been extra conversations that wanted to occur.”

She mentioned she had needed not to consider it in any respect. “However clearly I wanted to work on it, as a result of it was popping out.”

Whereas the file explores different subjects, too, “I feel it’s about how my emotional responses have been fashioned by that, how my relationship to music has been fashioned by that,” she mentioned. “And this remembrance of not being protected as a youthful particular person makes me very overly protecting once I see the abuse of energy.”

Dupuis’s songwriting grew out of disparate sources. A vital one was singing in a youngsters’s choir whose director “gravitated towards actually unusual music,” she recalled. “I feel he actually appreciated the irony of those angelic-looking 12-year-olds singing and holding out dissonant notes and switching between weird time signatures.”

That occurs to explain Speedy Ortiz songs, too.

Dupuis additionally soaked up Nineteen Nineties indie and different rock: bands just like the Mars Volta, Deftones, Pixies, Pavement, Helium and Throwing Muses, who wrapped convoluted concepts in squalling preparations. True to the group spirit of do-it-yourself punk and indie rock within the Nineteen Nineties, Dupuis and her bands have been activists, placing time into causes like unionization, treating dependancy with hurt discount and supplying jail inmates with devices.

Dupuis began making her personal music early. Her mom bought her a drum equipment to play within the basement. “I used to be a really offended 16-year-old,” she mentioned. “She thought if I may begin taking part in drums, that may be useful.”

She additionally studied guitar and keyboards, and he or she started posting her personal home-recorded songs to Myspace whereas she was nonetheless in highschool. As she took to taking part in, Dupuis typically discovered herself the one woman amongst male musicians, and, she mentioned, “I dressed like slightly punk boy.”

However at a sure level she selected what she known as, with amusing, “a course overcorrection” — one which has her performing these days in candy-colored attire and lengthy acrylic fingernails, in addition to writing songs in that pink-walled dwelling studio.

“In some unspecified time in the future I felt actually sick of seeing solely this sure illustration of guitar music,” she mentioned. “If the objective is to divorce guitar from a gender or from a gender presentation, then why not go actually, actually arduous within the different path? It felt like a approach to make up for the assimilation underneath one gender that rock music had felt trapped in for some time.”

The acrylic nails had a technical benefit, too. The plastic made fingerstyle guitar taking part in as loud as taking part in with a choose. Dupuis has despatched male guitar colleagues to a favourite nail salon.

Audrey Zee Whitesides, who performs bass in each the stay Sad13 band and in Speedy Ortiz, mentioned, “Sadie is a really pushed, artistic particular person. She actually has a imaginative and prescient. She’ll come to the band with a demo that already has a number of guitar tracks and bass tracks and drum tracks. The songs are so dense that it’s good to have a preview of how all of the devices are going to be in dialog with one another.”

The title of “Rabbit Rabbit” comes from a ritual Dupuis performs on the primary day of each month: saying “rabbit rabbit” for good luck. She began writing every music on the album by giving it a shade, dressing in that shade and eager about what sounds would match it. “Cry Cry Cry,” she mentioned, was pink; “Scabs,” with its snappy little chorus “Don’t speak to me!,” was “darkish purple.”

Dupuis mentioned she has obsessive compulsive dysfunction, and when she finds herself consumed by “the actually, actually tiny particulars” in a music” — whether or not a lyric ought to use “a” or “the,” the precise settings to dial right into a programmed drum sound, the place to crank up what began as a fallacious notice in a guitar solo — she pulls out an hourglass crammed with pink sand that her mom gave her and permits herself only one flip of it to resolve.

Speedy Ortiz recorded “Rabbit Rabbit” at two evocative studios: Rancho de la Luna, in California, with its enormous assortment of classic amps, guitars and results, and Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, the place Fiona Apple and Bon Iver have recorded.

“She does an amazing job of figuring out when to be touching the trauma and pouring emotion into it,” Tudzin mentioned. “After which it’s a job. As artists, we’re all on this realm of exposing our innards and guts to the world. However with regards to the studio, there’s a time to be emotional and a time that’s nearly repetition and getting the job completed and getting the sounds proper, which isn’t at all times like a soulful or emotional expertise.”

Extremely technical music; heartfelt outcomes. For Dupuis they’re inseparable. “A variety of this file, it’s like a twin feeling of anxiety-producing and I’m happy with it,” she mentioned. “The scary factor is I’m like, ‘Effectively, the place may I presumably go after that?’ That is my deepest, darkest, you already know, most painful factor that I’ve wrung out. For the sake of a 13-track album.”