On the front cover of Glasshouse, Jessie Ware is pictured emerging from the courtyard of the Neuendorf House on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain. The modernist villa, designed by architects John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin, is less a house than a series of walls that give shape to different kinds of space: long hallways that open out onto a tennis court and a rectangular pool, the ceilings in the interior partially deleted to let long rhombuses of light in. The photo is not exclusively focused on Ware and the shadows pooling around her; the eye is drawn as much to the soft, ruddy brown of the walls or the blue sky packed into a crisp rectangle above her. Ware wanted the cover to emphasize architecture; as she explained in an interview the week before the image was shot, “I want it to be a beautiful image that maybe I’m a small part of.”

Each song on Glasshouse has its own distinct aesthetic; unlike her previous albums, 2012’s Devotion and 2014’s Tough Love, there are no songs here that could be confused for each other, none that seem an afterthought carved from the greater mood of the album. Here, tracks are discrete entities, seemingly designed and assembled by its own team of architects, whether it’s Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat, and Happy Perez embroidering “Selfish Love” with weightless, rippling flamenco guitar or Stint forming the spine of “Your Domino” entirely out of soft synthetic pulses. It almost feels like Ware is trying to divert attention from herself, but she is positioned directly at the center of the album’s trembling choreography. She connects each of these unrelated environments—shaping them, in the tradition of singers like Anita Baker, into slippery vacuums of desire. They’re songs about how feelings tend not to map onto reality, and how reality tends to be undisturbed by the weight of our feelings. And Glasshouse came at a deepy emotional time for Ware; she wrote much of its lyrics after giving birth to her daughter, while immersed in the exhaustion of early parenthood.

The intimacy that exists at the margins of sleep isn’t ordinarily a subject of pop music; in the last 10 years, it can be mostly located in R&B songs like Janet Jackson’s “No Sleeep,” Maxwell’s “Pretty Wings,” and Miguel’s “Coffee,” among others. But this is precisely the feeling that Ware is trying to draw to the surface of her record, the idle moments that initially seem to have little universal importance but people tend to find themselves in, anyway. As if imitating the Neuendorf villa, on Glasshouse, Ware longs to partially delete the ceiling of her own house, in order to zoom in on the private warmth of domesticity. In the closing track “Sam,” which Ware co-wrote with Ed Sheeran, she drinks a cup of coffee at a train station and seems to lose herself in someone else’s conversation—but even as her thoughts scatter, they always circle back to her husband and her child and the ways in which they both rerouted her life. “And I hope I’m as brave as my mother, wondering what kind of mother will I be,” she sings in the chorus. “I hope she knows that I found a man far from my father/Sam, my baby, and me.” The acoustic guitar, Pino Palladino’s bass, and Ware’s voice seem to disappear into a humming cloud of synths and cymbals, through which Nico Segal plays a trumpet solo; his individual notes cluster, separate, and pulse faintly through the membrane of smoke.

Ware feels especially at home in the more organic arrangements on Glasshouse. “Selfish Love” and “Sam” are supported by the rhythm section of bassist Palladino and drummer Chris Dave, both of whom accompanied D’Angelo on his 2014 album Black Messiah, and whose playing shapeshifted according to the liquid design of that album’s funk and soul songs. Dave and Palladino are extraordinary, dexterous players; on Ware’s songs, which aren’t necessarily detached from either funk or soul, they express themselves primarily through restraint—Dave barely plays on the verses of “Selfish Love,” and his interlocking rhythms in the chorus make it sound as if the track is being pushed by whispers. Stint supplies live drums to the slow jam “Stay Awake, Wait for Me,” and the delay between each snare hit adds a stretchy emptiness between Ware’s shivering musical sighs. The song itself sounds drowsy, only half-awake to its own desires, formed in a language that repeats itself and digresses, as if it were composed just after Ware surfaced from a deep dream. “We could be a perfect picture,” Ware sings. “Picture this/An endless kiss/You’re hanging on my lips.”

On the album’s best song, “Last of the True Believers,” Ware sketches another intimate scene: a couple (possibly a family) driving through mist, abandoning a vast city behind them. The details stop evolving there and begin to evaporate as Ware’s attention drifts toward more abstract but enveloping images. “Let’s be alone together, where the sky falls through the river,” she sings, and the family, the car, and the city are absorbed into this greater feeling. The instruments behind her gently flicker and glow. This is Ware’s particular talent: her ability to seamlessly flow from the specific to the general, from complicated to clear, her songs gradually including you. “Let’s get lost forever/Are you hearing me?” she sings; her words are echoed by Paul Buchanan, frontman of the glacial Scottish band the Blue Nile, who developed the form of immersive romanticism which Ware inhabits here. “Last of the True Believers” brings to mind a reel of discrete images of longing: thickets of illuminated buildings, streetlamps glowing through a thick fog, a love so intimate and powerful it not only maps onto the environment seamlessly but it changes it. It’s architecture. Ware is just a small part of the beautiful image, but she’s also the reason for it.