On the title observe of her third album as L’Rain, Taja Cheek chants, “I killed your canine.” The repetition of the 4 phrases sounds dissociative at first; as Cheek croons by way of a scrim of vocal processing, a tinge of remorse appears to enter her voice. However her unsettling lyrics and eerily overdubbed vocals trace at a stranger image. “I felt the blood drip from my tooth,” Cheek’s narrator says. “I felt the waves hitting my face.” Finally, Cheek twists the proverbial knife: “It made me glad,” the killer confesses, the disclosure adopted by sinister laughs that float by way of an abyss of languid synths and sax. And she or he’s not achieved but. Within the closing seconds, Cheek will get surreal, singing “I am your canine.”

That is the theatrical, elliptical, and bewitching temper of I Killed Your Canine, which revamps L’Rain’s usually introspective music into baroque dreamscapes. After exploring the peculiar weight of grief and the weary labor of self-improvement on her first two albums, the singer and multi-instrumentalist turns her consideration to a different type of interiority: ardour. The extreme emotion provides aptitude and drama to her layered songs, centering the playfulness as soon as pushed to the margins of her music. Just one fictional pet will get snuffed, however the entire album is bolder and brasher than earlier L’Rain data, each concord, loop, and skit engorged with verve. Cheek has discovered the right way to keep her slippery, impressionistic fashion whereas additionally letting it’s recognized she’s obtained that canine in her.

Cheek and her cadre of session musicians set up the album’s beguiling mode early. “Our Funeral” head-fakes as a torch tune, floating Cheek’s wealthy decrease register over plaintive keys and flickering synths. However Cheek’s lament to a doomed relationship is curiously keen. “Finish of days/Are you prepared?” she repeats as if calling forth a vengeful god, a cauldron of snaps, melodies, and drums burbling beneath her. This breakup doesn’t simply really feel like the tip of the world; it beckons it. Single “Pet Rock” is outwardly flip, providing wry metacommentary on the erasure of Black folks in rock over nimble, Strokes-style guitar melodies. “/I’m invisible/Reduce the bullshit/And make me into/One thing else,” Cheek sings. The truth that she’s the guitarist heightens the irony.

Humor, specific and delicate, capabilities because the album’s Rosetta Stone. Within the temporary skit “What’s That Music?,” somebody asks for assist figuring a jazz tune. “I do know it appears like all of them,” they are saying after crudely mimicking the melody. Seconds later, a full band blips in to really play the tune, their wealthy tones snapping the imitation to life and underscoring the condescension of the query. The bit, paying homage to Grownup Swim business bumps, is extraordinarily humorous—particularly for those who’ve ever been the goof mangling a half-remembered tune. Cheek has stated she got down to make the “actual reverse” of experimental music that’s heady and untouchable, and the immediacy of comedy fits that mission.