Dan Bejar landed on the title of the new Destroyer album Have We Met when the project was nearly completed. “It's a nostalgic phrase, in some ways,” the 47-year-old artist tells me over the phone during a rare snowy day in his hometown of Vancouver. “I don't think I've heard a human being utter the words, ‘Have we met?’ I've only just read it in books or seen it in old movies.” It’s a neat summary of what makes Bejar a beguiling and brilliant songwriting force: like a magician performing a sleight of hand, he can draw rapture, remorse, and revival from places seemingly foggy and sneakily universal.

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Adding to the romance of it all is the fact that Bejar isn’t in full control of the font of his own creativity — and doesn’t want to be. “I don't know how to sit down and write,” he says. “Destroyer songs are always really flawed. They're not perfect little dioramas. They have a lot of the guts showing.” Each of the 13 Destroyer albums have been different from the last, distant siblings united by Bejar’s fantastically mordant presence — 2011’s Kaputt, indebted to '80s pop and jazz, was the breakout that introduced the world to Bejar, the bone-dry beat poet, walking musical encyclopedia, and now era-defining indie rock star.

Bejar never embraced the former title and took four years to complete Kaputt’s follow-up, Poison Season, a prestigious-sounding record that glows with epic orchestration aiming for the cheap seats in a pricey theater. Five years and another album (2017’s synthy, stellar ken) later, Have We Met arrives. The album may utilize material Bejar wrote during Kaputt sessions, but it keeps up the tradition of each Destroyer album standing on its own in the catalogue: The Blue Nile’s 1989 album Hats, new age ambient music, and chart-topping electronica-infused pop of the late ‘90s are some of the varied touchstones.

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Bejar wrote the album in collaboration with producer John Collins and guitarist Nick Bragg, sending drafts and ideas remotely over the computer. “We talked early on about making this kind of record that was more into sound design, more filmic.” Bejar says. “Trying to keep the music itself as minimal as possible.” The initial idea carried on to the finished version, along with “cooked, electronic-sounded songs” that Bejar credits to Collins’s appreciation for The Art of Noise and Massive Attack. As always, Bejar is the centerpiece, delivering his lyrics like an addled mystic without lapsing into alienating the listener: “As much as I try and buck against it,” he says, “half of me always ends up writing half of a pop song.”

On the release of Have We Met, here’s Bejar’s rundown on each of the album’s ten-songs, their composition, and how they fit inside the Destroyer project as a whole.