Dust is Laurel Halo’s loosest offering yet, orbiting out from its oddball-pop epicenters to the point of near-chaos. The producer’s music has always been exploratory, knitting together synth-pop, Detroit techno, and jazz with a singular, continuous voice, and that process feels particularly gleeful here. Her vocals and lyrics are, just like the instrumentals into which they’re woven, another site of play: The voicings of Halo and her collaborators—notably Klein and Lafawndah on the standout single “Jelly”—recall as much the experiments of Meredith Monk as they do a more tightly laced pop single. Meanwhile, her stylized lyrics lean into nouveau-Beatnik territory as she asks questions like, “Did this ever happen/Do you ever happen?” over stretched-out dub. But even if Halo dips unapologetically into weirder and more challenging zones than she has before, Dust is also, on some level, a genuinely fun album—one that bears the stamp of its creator’s limitless curiosity. –Thea Ballard

Listen: Laurel Halo, “Do U Ever Happen”