When you hear the name Anna Wise, you might think first of Kendrick Lamar—but before she sang on his music, Wise was the eccentric half (or one-third, depending on who was in the group) of Sonnymoon, a New York-based alt-soul and bedroom pop outfit. You never knew what you’d get from her: On a song like “The Fear,” she sounded playful, almost cartoonish; on “Things to Come,” she faded to the background, her piercing falsetto reduced to background noise amid clattering bass drums. Sonnymoon made waves in underground music circles, and around 2016, Wise’s light began to shine brighter, magnified by star turns on songs like “Real” and the Grammy Award-winning “These Walls.” Yet Wise kept churning out the same esoteric soul she always had: She released a solo project, 2016’s The Feminine: Act I, a pop-focused set with electro-soul and hip-hop on the fringes, followed less than a year later by The Feminine: Act II. Then, in 2018, Wise and Jon Bap—a noted vocalist/producer and Wise’s significant other—quietly released a collaborative LP called geovariance, an abstract collage of fuzzy vocal loops and tape glitches that foreshadowed Wise’s proper solo debut album.

As If It Were Forever isn’t so wonky, though. Mixing quiet storm R&B, ambient, and acoustic soul, Forever is Wise’s most accessible and fully-formed record, the clearest entry point to her catalog. The peculiar tweaks are still there: “Worm’s Playground” opens with a jumble of loop-pedal vocals, and “Coming Home” is just ambient hums coiled into a quick meditative interlude. The guest features come and go, breezing in and out as Wise’s protagonist holds court. Appearances by rapper Little Simz on the self-loving ode “Abracadabra” and rapper/singer Pink Siifu on the sugary, folk-centric “One of These Changes Is You” give the impression of a collaborative effort between musicians who share a love of cryptic artistry and aren’t defined by arbitrary definitions of hip-hop and soul. Forever is like an open mic in that way: The tracks fade into each other, maintaining a sense of continuity that makes the record feel like a 38-minute suite. It’s a head-in-the-clouds LP where the singer dips between reality and surrealism, exploring the fleeting moments—laughing with friends, relaxing with a lover at home—that she wishes could last an eternity. Forever is about breathing in the good times before they dissolve, and understanding that the only constant in life is change.

Lyrically, the songs on Forever read like jotted-down missives in an old diary, ink bleeding through its yellow pages. “Abracadabra” runs through the should I or shouldn’t I of new love, basking in the glow of romance and the tension of maintaining desire. But like everything else, the adoration fades. On “Vivre d’Amour et d’Eau Fraîche,” a sultry duet with Bap near album’s end, the two lean into each other, their voices melded into one. Where “Abracadabra” ends on a somber note, “Vivre d’Amour” is an after-hours slow burner, applying sex and tenderness in equal measure. “Your skin on my skin,” Bap sings over warped guitar chords and barely-there drums. “Your path met my path, several doors are open and all of them divine.” Forever isn’t entirely sentimental; “Nerve” is a chest-thumping proclamation of independence. “I’m not gonna play the safe side,” she declares over scant marching drums and background studio chatter. “I don’t wanna live a simple life when I’m not a simple woman.” On a record wrestling with self-doubt and faded memories of the past, Wise is taking life as it comes and on her own terms.