At the beginning of the video for “Door”—the lead single, out today, from Caroline Polachek’s first solo album—we see the singer through a window. She’s on a tiled roof in chunky Mary Janes and thigh-high socks, looking up to the stars. Lit by moonlight, she could be the girl sneaking out of her bedroom at night in a classic ’80s high school flick, or something more literary: one of the haunted girls stalking Shirley Jackson’s Gothic novellas, or Cathy’s ghost in Wuthering Heights, tapping on the window and begging to be let in. (Didn’t another off-beat pop artist with acrobatic vocals immortalize that character once before?)

But while the visuals reflect the cryptic lyrics she wrote as one half of indie-pop duo Chairlift, where song titles included “Amanaemonesia” and “Polymorphing,” this time the music is heading into more personal terrain. “With this record, I was really pushing myself to be more honest. Looking back to the first Chairlift record, there essentially weren’t any love songs,” Polachek says. “I remember thinking that writing love songs was stupid and cliché, and that my job was to not write love songs, because there are enough of them. I guess I’ve gotten older and more sentimental, and I’ve realized that the love song is just the modern equivalent of a devotional.”

Photo: Courtesy of Sony Music Photo: Courtesy of Sony Music

It’s been more than three years since Chairlift disbanded, having risen to accidental ubiquity via their sleeper hit “Bruises” that infamously soundtracked an iPod advert during the late-’00s indie boom. Perhaps lesser known are the two critically acclaimed follow-ups that never quite got the commercial attention they deserved: the eerie, ’80s-inflected synth-pop of 2012’s Something, then 2016’s Moth, a glossy, euphoric record about life in the city. Today, the Brooklyn-centric indie scene where they first made their name has largely faded away, but Polachek sees it as a blessing in disguise. “I think there was a real lane built for indie bands during the time when Chairlift came up,” she says. “I felt a little bit trapped in that lane in some ways. For better or worse, that lane has disappeared. I don’t feel like I have a clear lane in the music industry right now, which is actually very exciting.”

If there is a new lane for artists like Polachek today, it’s one she had a hand in paving. Post-Chairlift, she’s been quietly working on this first solo record, due out later this year, while, on the side, making music in whatever form felt right at the time: an experimental, peripatetic career model that musicians as big as Miley Cyrus are now moving to adopt. Over the past few years, this came largely by way of sporadically released collaborations with the cream of avant-garde pop, from Fischerspooner to Charli XCX to Danny L Harle of the agenda-setting alt-pop collective PC Music. And in an unlikely twist of fate, Harle ended up being one of her closest collaborators, coproducing around two-thirds of the forthcoming album.