Two years ago, Merrill Garbus decided to learn how to D.J. The Oakland, Calif.-based indie-pop musician, known for her pan-global rhythmic loops and frank lyrics in Tune-Yards, had little experience behind turntables but she dived in headfirst, booking a Tuesday night residency at a bar near the studio where she records. “I hadn’t been in charge of an evening like that before,” said Ms. Garbus, 38. “What does the audience want to dance to? How do you know what they want before they say so? It taught me a lot.”

You can hear the lessons of the dance floor in the music she and her bandmate, Nate Brenner, made for Tune-Yards’ fourth album, “I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life,” due Jan. 19. A sleek, radical evolution from the clattering collages that first earned Tune-Yards an audience (notably on the 2011 album “Whokill,” which won that year’s Village Voice critics’ poll), the new LP is full of insistent beats, catchy hooks and pointed questions about modern society. “I ask myself, what should I do?/But all I know is white centrality,” Ms. Garbus sings on the bubbly single “ABC 123.” Amid preparations for a tour that begins in Sacramento on Feb. 15, she spoke with The New York Times from her home. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

You participated in a six-month workshop on race at the East Bay Meditation Center while you were working on this album. What was the most surprising thing you learned there?

The whole thing was surprising. We met twice a month, looking at Buddhist principles and our roles as white folks in the community, with readings and videos. A lot of it — learning about a concept like white fragility, for instance — was like, “Oh my God. There’s a word for this?” Instead of walking through the world with this huge amount of defensiveness, [thinking], “I will not be racist,” to say, “Merrill, you are racist, simply by being brought up white in this society. So how does that feel? And let’s move from there.”