“Gatekeeper,” which appeared on her 2017 EP “Kiddo,” bluntly describes her music business #MeToo encounter with a producer who claimed to be interested in her voice: “30 million people want a shot/How much would it take for you to spread those legs apart?” she sang. She not only made a music video of the song itself, but also a 13-minute film dramatizing the incident.

Reyez wrote “Far Away,” released in 2019, about a faithful long-distance romance, only to realize after she finished writing the song that certain lines jumped out at her: “You’re still waiting for your papers/Been feeling like the government wants us to break up.” The song’s video showed wrenching images of an immigration raid and family separations. “I felt motivated to want to make something that would act as a conduit for empathy, as a window for anybody who’d never been through it,” she said.

Reyez released her EPs in 2017 and 2018; the second, “Being Human in Public,” was nominated for a Grammy for best urban contemporary album. She also had guest spots on songs by hitmakers like Romeo Santos (singing in Spanish), Calvin Harris and Eminem, who returned the favor by appearing on the new album as the seething but still attached boyfriend in “Coffin,” a lovers’ quarrel infused with mortality that imagines a coffin “handmade for two.” A picture of it appears on the album cover.

Eminem, who discovered Reyez singing “Gatekeeper” on late-night television, said he admires both her directness and her craftsmanship. “She sings from her heart,” he said by phone from Detroit. “She’s writing about [expletive] that she’s been through and stuff like that. But it’s not easy to do what she does, and she makes it look so easy.”