Carly Rae Jepsen doesn’t sing love songs, exactly. A friend pointed out that Carly lives in the intervals—when love is just out of frame, acting as a gravitational force. Her songs are preludes and codas. “First Time,” the opening track of E•MO•TION* Side B*—a collection of outtakes released a year after last year’s E•MO•TION—is a coda and prelude at the same time. It begins as a cassette-recording of its own chorus, a distorted and decayed memory of itself, which is then rewound to the start of its verse before it drops in with a sudden, severe clarity. The song is about a messy breakup that she tries to guide back to the more intelligible beginnings of a relationship. She sings, “When my heart breaks it always feels like the first time,” and, “Through all the heartbreak we’ll make it feel like the first time.” This is how time works in Jepsen’s songs. Every emotion contains all previous instances of its feeling and is experienced as a collapsed whole. The songs on E•MO•TION* Side B* are pop songs, gorgeous and direct, but they are also extremely recursive spaces, blushing compressions of time, small infinities of heartbreak.

These songs, sometimes more so than the album for which they were recorded, fold in synthetic textures from ’80s pop and give them a modern finish, producing music that feels incongruent with both of its intended time periods. The songs can derive meaning and power from their associative design; in “Higher,” for instance, synths provide both the song’s texture and rhythm, and guitars glimmer as if they were stars embedded in the track; it produces the crisp, fussed architecture of a Scritti Politti song and fills it with new feelings. It’s the most transparent “love” song released from Jepsen’s sessions for E•MO•TION (for which apparently 250 songs were written) in that it takes place in the context of an actual relationship. Elsewhere she is repelled or attracted by love, either by its presence or absence. “We should know better, this can’t last forever/Kiss me one more time,” she sings in “The One,” a song in which she actively resists the boundaries of a relationship but still finds herself slipping into its pull. There’s a shyness to the beat of “The One,” a kind of internal swerve as if it’s resisting the same designations and definitions as Jepsen. Form and function also align in “Cry,” a song animated by a synth bass that’s just muted enough to invert its usual effect, generating a feeling of weightlessness. Jepsen uses this environment to describe the cruel asymmetry of being in a relationship with someone who’s emotionally unavailable.

The songs on E•MO•TION* Side B* feel decidedly more like a continuation of E•MO•TION itself. Still, a few are included to reveal a more disordered process, a sense that Jepsen was working through as many forms and ideas as possible until she found the aesthetic for E•MO•TION. “Body Language,” co-written with Dev Hynes, builds to a chorus that feels like an unremarkable subplot of the verse. “Store” is fascinating, in that it sounds like different songs written at different times had inorganically fused together. The verse is carefully sung, a dream sequence from which the chorus is a violent waking. “I’m just going to the store,” Jepsen sings over synths that resemble individual belches of a saxophone, “You might not see me anymore.” Its greatest appeal lies perhaps in the conceit of the lyric, that Jepsen might casually break up with someone by walking to a nearby deli and dematerializing.

2015’s E•MO•TION has the design of a big pop record, but it found more critical success than commercial. “With pop I think the hidden article of faith is that music can take over public space, stamp itself on a moment,” Pitchfork contributor Tom Ewing wrote in 2011. “If a pop single can't do this, then what is it?” Like most pop music that’s only “pop” in an idiomatic sense, it tends to function as an unintended secret. Jepsen released E•MO•TION* Side B* in this spirit, a gift to the fiercely devoted if niche fanbase she’s amassed since the release of E•MO•TION. That the songs can sound enormous while maintaining this kind of person-to-person intimacy is Jepsen’s particular talent. On “Fever,” in the weird and unstable space just before a breakup, Jepsen describes stealing her boyfriend’s bicycle and then riding it back to his house, only to discover he’s not home. His absence causes a near silence in the song, where Jepsen's musical and emotional environment are vacuumed into the throb of a bass drum, a kind of vertigo and panic encoded in sound. “You want to break my heart/All right,” she sings, “I caught your fever/I’ll be feeling it forever.” In this fluctuating reality, the synths she sings over have a glow that’s both alien and familiar, like objects under a blacklight. It feels like the feeling.