For Jennifer Lee, the worst part of recovering from two brain surgeries wasn’t the loss of her ability to comprehend language. It wasn’t even the fact that she had to relearn how to walk, or the extreme anxiety she felt stepping outside after an extended recovery period spent immobile. The worst part was that Lee, who produces kinetic, psychedelic hip-hop beats as TOKiMONSTA, couldn’t make music anymore. She couldn’t even hear it as music. “All music just sounded like noise,” she tells me by phone recently. “I remember being like, ‘Ooh, this is weird! This is metallic, harsh nonsense to me.’”

The Los Angeles-based Lee, who was diagnosed with an extremely rare and potentially fatal brain disease called Moyamoya at the end of 2015, eventually regained her ability to comprehend music. Her forthcoming third album, Lune Rouge, consists entirely of songs she wrote after her recovery. Though its lyrics don’t address the specifics of her ordeal (and often arrive via guests like Joey Purp, MNDR, and Yuna), the music is embedded with Lee’s struggle to overcome the biggest challenge of her life. Lune Rouge tends more melancholy than the West Coast beatwork she’s produced in the past, which has included bold and bright collaborations with the likes of Anderson .Paak and Gavin Turek, but it also carries an undertone of hope, even exuberance. Sharp, clear instrumentals cut through airy vocals across 11 tracks that raise Lee’s music to new emotional heights.

Though Lee told very few people about her illness during her treatment and recovery, she’s now chosen to tell her story publicly for the first time. Below is her story, in her own words.

About 10 years ago, I started getting migraines. I got an MRI to make sure I didn’t have a tumor, and I also did an MRA, which shows the vascularity of your brain—the blood pathways. The scans were normal, except for this one little area where the vascularity in my brain was shrunken. The artery feeding the left side of my brain had shrunk 60 to 70 percent. It was only this one section, so they thought it was an anomaly. It was pretty stressful because I didn’t know what it was and no one had an answer for me. There was only one doctor who said, “This potentially could be this ultra rare disease called Moyamoya. You’re not symptomatic in other ways, so let’s watch it.”

Ten years later, in the fall of 2015, I had this weird episode where I was walking and suddenly I couldn’t feel my foot. It was a really strange sensation, like as I put my foot down there was nothing to stop my body from hitting the ground. I had a ghost foot. I was completely fine after that one moment, but it scared the shit out of me. That was the first time in 10 years where I was reminded that I still had that stenosis in my left carotid artery. It had been so long, my new doctor didn’t even know I’d had all these tests done in the past. I mentioned it to her and she was like, “OK, why don’t we get you another MRA just in case?”