When she thinks about her most dedicated fans, Joanna Newsom knows exactly what her duties are. Her songs, she said on a recent visit to New York City, have “layers, layers, layers” — layers of historical and literary allusion in the lyrics, layers of delicate intricacy in the music. Now, on the verge of releasing her fourth studio album, she is pushed further by her appreciative listeners. “I definitely can’t write an easy song,” she said. “There is a group of people who are showing up with absolute, complete faith that there’s something worth digging for in the lyrics. And if I don’t put it in there, it’s like breaking a contract.”

Ms. Newsom’s “Divers” (Drag City), due Oct. 23, is her first new collection since 2010, and it carries her singular music even further, adding new convolutions of counterpoint while also staying more succinct. “It felt natural to make the songs shorter in form, to break it up in bite-sized pieces,” Ms. Newsom said. In August, she released one track, “Sapokanikan,” and her fans’ rapid response astonished her. “It’s crazy,” she said in September. “I thought maybe a year after ‘Sapokanikan’ came out, all the references would start to get established and become common knowledge. But a few days after it came out, someone sent me a link and they had already figured out so much.”

The music in “Sapokanikan” hints at antique American styles while it evades them, fluctuating amid ragtime, waltz and parlor song. Melodies arrive from the stratosphere in Ms. Newsom’s guileless, quizzical soprano. The lyrics, meanwhile, are packed with philosophical musings and historical nuggets. For starters, Sapokanikan was the name of a Lenape (Native American) village in southwest Manhattan, where Greenwich Village is now — one of the many bits of New York City lore that are threaded through the verses.