A few years ago, Dan Snaith was deep in a YouTube wormhole when he came across a vintage soul track called "Home." It was a song by Gloria Barnes, a little-known R&B singer who had released just one album, 1971's Uptown, before disappearing from music forever. Snaith was particularly hypnotized by the opening moments, in which Barnes sings the titular word, then declares "Baby, I'm home, I'm home!" in a throaty, expressive wail.

"The minute I heard it, I had to download it from YouTube and looped it up and put a beat under it," Snaith, the Canadian electronic musician better known as Caribou, told VICE. "I didn't really think I was making anything that would end up on a Caribou album—I just wanted to hear that part repeating and going on forever." The sample sat dormant on his hard drive for more than a year; he wasn't sure how to finish it. Now it's the secret ingredient of "Home," the thumping, kaleidoscope-soul centerpiece (and first single) of Caribou's excellent new album, Suddenly.

Snaith has a knack for chopping up fragments of old soul vocals and looping them into unexpected new hooks. His dreamy 2014 track "Can't Do Without You"—Caribou's most popular single ever—was built around a brief, pitch-shifted sample of a Marvin Gaye vocal. His 2012 song "Yes, I Know," released under the moniker Daphni, took its name from a rousing sample of a Buddy Miles refrain.

But this was different. Gloria Barnes was never famous. Although her album has been embraced by soul fanatics—Aquarium Drunkard calls it a "super rare gem of killer '70s funk and soul" and notes that original pressings have fetched up to $3,000 on Discogs—her name is largely unknown and her story an enigma. Who is this singer with the smoldering wail? "I don't know much about her life or where she ended up, unfortunately, or even whether she's still alive or not," Snaith said.

Snaith didn't want to manipulate the sample beyond recognition. "There's so much emotion packed into her vocal even when she's just singing a couple words, and the playing on the record is so great," Snaith said. "When I heard it, I immediately thought of people like Madlib, The RZA, Just Blaze, early Kanye—people who made amazing hip-hop beats out of looping up soul records. Sometimes those beats are amazing flips and chops of the original sample material, but I knew that in this case the original loop was so good that what I had to do was just not mess with it."