It’s long been common, listening to Apple, to experience such pangs of identification followed by prickles of unease. Her tumbled-out lyrics identify ex-boyfriends and bullies, and they paint vignettes that could be drawn only from the experience of a woman who’s been locked in a lifelong battle against the sexist label “ingenue.” Often what’s so stunning about her music is that it feels like a self-administered CT scan, from which diagnosing anyone else’s ailments would not only be futile but irresponsible. Right now especially, it’s clear that appropriation via metaphor is not always a victimless crime: It can scramble shared understandings of reality, inflating the frivolous and defanging the urgent. (Say it again: Social distancing is not just like prison.)

But also right now, it’s rarely been more necessary to vest expansive power in art and the experiences it documents. When nightmare scenarios transition to the waking world, stark fictions and knotty personal histories offer guidance less in the factual specifics than in their emotional terrain. Apple hasn’t just thought deeply about what it means to be alone—she’s thought about what it means to choose to be alone for protection, painful though it might be. To shy away from the universality of that theme risks treating her work as exhibitionism. It also risks contradicting her key insight: that surviving apartness means recognizing it as a shared experience.

One shock of isolation is the way it forces people into mental cul-de-sacs. Without places to go and people to see, many of us are spinning backward and inward, where we obsess over super-near spaces and sprawling memory troves. On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Apple describes something akin to this sensation, but in an empowering way. “I spread like strawberries,” she barks, drill-sergeant-like, over subterranean bashing sounds. “I climb like peas and beans.” She’s portraying herself as a productive plant, growing without going anywhere. The song’s title, “Heavy Balloon,” recasts depression as something almost playful, to bat and swat at. There’s no shying away from the harsh, immobilizing reality of despair, but there’s also no sense of defeat.

The album, Apple’s fifth, follows in this same down-is-up approach, musically and emotionally. Defiance tussles with remorse. Reflection, via mantric repetition, becomes a game. Contradictions are left unresolved for anarchic thrills. It’s her messiest and wildest album, which is saying something after 2012’s brilliant The Idler Wheel… ditched studio orchestras for a frenzied duo of singer and drummer. Bolt Cutters returns to a fuller sound while maintaining Idler’s scratching-at-the-stucco feel. Layers of stuff pile onto stomping, polyphonic rhythms; eventually, most songs topple into noisy denouements. Apple, while remaining introspective, gazes outward for her most overtly political work yet. Yet her command of pure sound and sensation drives the show.

The piano on the opener, “I Want You to Love Me,” for example, is recorded in such a resonant manner that you can’t help but visualize her hands. The left one jabs low, percussive thuds; the right one darts with chords that swirl upward. Into the resulting reverie, Apple waxes existential, singing, “I know none of this will matter in the long run / But I know a sound is still a sound around no one.” Yet after that koan of self-sufficiency is a direct plea for help: “I want what I want / And I want you to love me.” The “you” is drawn out and raspy, and it gets more atonal every time she sings it. By the end of the song, she’s whimpering like a pet.