ISON, the debut album by the Dutch-Iranian vocalist Sevdaliza, was one of last year’s quiet standouts, in part because almost no one’s doing anything like it. For almost a decade now, artists have flirted with the (unfairly) maligned trip-hop genre, a bit embarrassedly and usually in the guise of something else: FKA twigs filtering breathy vocals and loops through alt-R&B, the Weeknd working with Esthero’s producer to bring out the genre’s seedier side, artists like Flume adapting downtempo arrangements for an EDM-accustomed world. But ISON, co-produced by Mucky and featuring lush strings by Mihai Puscoiu, leaned fully into the genre, in its The Blue God-era Martina Topley-Bird incarnation: all its breakbeats, all its unabashedly cinematic instrumentation, and all its heady introspection.

The Calling isn’t a departure from ISON so much as a distillation in both sound and in genre. The two pejoratives for trip-hop, the coffeeshop and the bedroom, suggest shallow, half-hearted connections with other people, which was always strange for a genre that, at its best, is about extensive self-reflection. And The Calling certainly has that, occasionally to excess. There’s a fair amount of woo to get past, starting in interviews and peaking in “Human Nature” with a sotto voce spoken-word quotation of the guru Osho, whose more salacious teachings are the subject of Netflix’s cult doc “Wild Wild Country.” Once you do, though, the music is well worth it.

Sevdaliza’s voice evokes the best bits of the genre’s greats—Tracey Thorn’s richness, Nicola Hitchcock’s tremolo—while adding distinctive melisma evoking her Iranian roots. Mucky hones his sound further here. Like Arca, his productions often dwell on empty space, and just how far it can expand; “Soothsayer,” in particular, has moments that spool out slowly, very much like parts of Björk’s Arca-produced Vulnicura. The Calling takes the best part of ISON—the strings—and makes them even more abundant and central.

“Human Nature” has a tough task—building a serious song on a refrain, “touched by an angel,” that shares its lyrics with the title of an unsalvageably glurge-y CBS show—but manages pathos anyway, and a sense of alienation. Sevdaliza’s freestyled vocal is Auto-Tuned and vocoded into the uncanny. The track’s a companion piece to the single “Soul Syncable,” the most traditionally trip-hop piece here. It circles a moody, voiceless refrain, over and over, without resolution: “I’m on codeine,” she sings, “you can’t escape, patterns keep you going.”

The Calling suffers, at times, where ISON did: in structure. The EP is more concise than ISON, yet each track still has enough surprises to fill an EP of its own. “Voodoov” weaves spooky cyberpunk sound effects throughout the mix. “Energ1” is built around a glitch-and-strings bridge reminiscent, in a great way, of the McCarricks (string players who have collaborated with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gary Numan, and Kristin Hersh). And “Observer” is something quite different, the only thing on the EP that can be called “pop”—an insistent bass synth, a nudge up in tempo, and a bit of ironic contrast: The poppiest, most upbeat track on the album is about being an observer, an outsider. But these moments are scattered throughout often sprawling arrangements. Nevertheless, the highs are high, the lows barely exist, and the rest is finely crafted: the work of a mind that has styled its interior down to the most immaculate detail.