Apple has tried all kinds of cures. She was sent to a family therapist at the age of eleven, when, mad at her sister, she glibly remarked, on a school trip, that she planned to kill herself and take Amber with her. After she was raped, she spent hours at a Model Mugging class, practicing self-defense by punching a man in a padded suit. In 2011, she attended eight weeks of silent Buddhist retreats, meditating from 5 a.m.to 9 p.m., with no eye contact—it was part of a plan to become less isolated. She had a wild breakthrough one day, in which the world lit up, showing her a pulsing space between the people at the retreat—a suggestion of something larger. That vision is evoked in the new song “I Want You to Love Me,” in which Apple sings, with raspy fervor, of wanting to get “back in the pulse.”

She tried a method for treating P.T.S.D. called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, and—around the time she poured her vodka down the drain, in 2018—an untested technique called “brain balancing.” Articles about neurological anomalies fascinated her. The first day we met, Apple spread printouts of brain scans on the floor of her studio, pointing to blue and pink shapes. She was seeking patterns, just as she often did on Tumblr, reposting images, doing rabbit-hole searches that she knew were a form of magical thinking.

Apple doesn’t consider herself an alcoholic, but for years she drank vodka alone, every night, until she passed out. When she’d walk by the freezer, she’d reach for a sip; for her, the first step toward sobriety was simply being conscious of that impulse. She had quit cocaine years earlier, after spending “one excruciating night” at Quentin Tarantino’s house, listening to him and Anderson brag. “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,” she joked. She loved getting loose on wine, but not the regret that followed. Her father has been sober for decades, but when Apple was a little kid he was a turbulent alcoholic. He hit bottom when he had a violent confrontation with a Manhattan cabdriver; Apple was only four, but she remembers his bloody face, the nurse at the hospital. When I visited Apple’s mother at her Manhattan apartment, she showed me a photo album with pictures of Apple as a child. One image was captioned “Fiona had too much wine—not feeling good,” with a scribbled sad face. Apple, at two, had wandered around an adult party, drinking the dregs.

For decades, Apple has taken prescription psychopharmaceuticals. She told me that she’d been given a diagnosis of “complex developmental post-traumatic stress disorder.” (It was such a satisfyingly multisyllabic phrase that she preferred to sing it, transforming it into a ditty.) In December, she began having mood swings, with symptoms bad enough that she was told to get an MRI, to rule out a pituitary tumor. In the end, Apple said, she had to wean herself off an antipsychotic that she had been prescribed for her night terrors; the dosage, she said, had been way too high. As she recovered, she felt troubled, sometimes, by a sense of flatness: if she couldn’t feel the emotion in the songs, she said, she wouldn’t be able to tell what worked.

Earlier that fall, she had given an interview to the Web site Vulture, in which she was brassy and perceptive. People responded enthusiastically—many young women saw in Apple a gutsy iconoclast who’d shrugged off the world’s demands. She won praise, too, for having donated a year’s worth of profits from “Criminal”—which J. Lo dances to in the recent movie “Hustlers”—to immigrant criminal-defense cases. But the positive response also threw her, she realized. “Even the best circumstances of being in public may be too much,” she told me.

By January, the situation was better. Apple was no longer having nightmares, although she was still worried, at times, by her moods. One layer of self-protection had been removed when she stopped using alcohol, she said; another was lost with the reduction in medication. And, although she was enthusiastic about some new mixes, she felt apprehensive. She could listen to the tracks, but only through headphones.

So we talked about the subject that made her feel best: the dog rescues she was funding. She paid her brother Bran to pick up the dogs across the country, then drive them to L.A., for placement in foster homes. She and Hallman followed along through videos that Bran sent them. The dogs had been through terrible experiences: one was raped by humans; another was beaten with a shovel. Apple felt that she should not flinch from these details. Rebecca Corry, of Stand Up for Pits, had given her advice for coping: “You have to celebrate small victories and remember their faces and move on to the next one.”

Then, one day, Apple’s band came to her house to listen to the latest mixes. The next afternoon, her face was glowing again. She had wondered if the meeting would be awkward—if the band might disagree on what edits to make. Instead, she and Amy Aileen Wood kept glancing at each other, ecstatic, as they had all the same responses. At last, Apple could listen to the album on speakers.

Afterward, I texted Wood. “Dare I say it was magical?!” Wood wrote. “Everything is sounding so damn good!” Steinberg told me that the notes were simple: “Get out of the way of the music” and let Apple’s voice dominate. Apple knew what she wanted, he said. He described his job as helping her to recognize “that she was her own Svengali.”

It reminded me of a story that Bran had told me, about working in construction. One day, when he was twenty-eight, he strolled out onto a beam suspended thirty-five feet in the air—a task that he’d done many times. Suddenly, he was frozen, terrified of falling. Yet all he had to do was touch something—any object at all—to break the spell. “Because you’re grounded, you can just touch a leaf on a tree and walk,” he said.

Seeing her band again had grounded Apple. She felt a renewed bravado. She’d made plans to rerelease “When the Pawn . . .” on vinyl, but with the original artwork, by Paul Thomas Anderson, swapped out. “That’s just a great album,” she told me. Looking back on her catalogue, she thought that her one weak song might be “Please Please Please,” on “Extraordinary Machine,” which she wrote only because the record company had demanded another track: “Please, please, please, no more melodies.”

In the next few weeks, she sent updates: she was considering potential video directors; she was brainstorming ideas for album art, like a sketch of Harvey Weinstein with his walker. She’d even gone out to see King Princess perform. One night, after petting Janet’s skull and talking to her, Apple went into her old bedroom: she was able to sleep on the futon again, with Mercy. She’d also got a new tattoo, of a black bolt cutter, running down her right forearm.

On the day that Jonathan Ames came over, Apple had pondered the exact nature of her work. Maybe, she suggested, she was like any other artist whose body is an instrument—a ballerina who wears her feet out or a sculptor who strains his back. Maybe she, too, wore herself out. Maybe that’s why she had to take time to heal in between projects. In “On I Go,” the first song she’d written for “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” she chanted about trying to lead a life guided by inner, rather than outer, impulses: “On I go, not toward or away / Up until now it was day, next day / Up until now in a rush to prove / But now I only move to move.” In the middle of the track, she screwed up the beat for a second and said, “Ah, fuck, shit.” It was a moment almost anyone making a final edit would smooth out. She left it in. ♦

A previous version of this article mistakenly included Grimes in a list of artists who débuted as teen-agers.