Some tracks on “When I Get Home” are named after Houston streets, and Solange’s lyrics (as they were in “Scales” on “A Seat at the Table”) are dotted with references to the city’s idiosyncratic status symbols like grills (extravagantly jeweled dental caps) and “slab” (slow, low and bangin’) cars with reflective “candy paint.”

Solange — echoing the artistic playbook of her sister, Beyoncé — paired the release of “When I Get Home” with an online film, which she directed and unveiled as an Apple Music exclusive. It’s a slightly abridged version of the entire album, accompanying non-narrative scenes of, among other things, black cowboys doing rodeo feats, a circular white arena holding group rituals in the desert, and dancers claiming Houston’s urban spaces. At the beginning and end of the film, Solange, in a glittering dress, dances alongside a mysteriously hooded Holy Ghost, revealed at the end as a black man. “The film is an exploration of origin, asking the question how much of ourselves do we bring with us versus leave behind in our evolution,” Solange said in a statement.

The film visualizes “Sound of Rain” as a computer-animated extravaganza: a stadium full of dancers that turns into a garden, a burning man, people riding flying machines. The song is one of the album’s closest approaches to pop-R&B, with an ingenious beat, terse melodies and abundant countermelodies; the lyrics are cryptic and sunken into the mix, but at the end Solange reveals, “Sound of rain/helps me let go of the pain.” Another near-pop song is “Jerrod,” a promise of intimacy — “Give you all the depths of my wanting” — that Solange coos with the airy tenacity of Janet Jackson.

For much of the album, Solange dissolves verse-chorus-verse into meditations and vamps. Keyboards supply rich chords that offer plenty of places to alight harmoniously; the beat is often an implied pulse that can and does leave behind 4/4 convention. In the chromatic haze, Solange ponders questions and considers life lessons in a few ambiguous words.

In “Beltway,” she sings “don’t, don’t, don’t,” pauses, and continues, “you love me”; it’s impossible to tell where the couple stand. In “Dreams,” she recalls growing up with dreams and advises patience: “Dreams, they come a long way — not today.” She teeters on the verge of a relationship in “Time (is)” — “I was getting to feel/All the way” Solange sings — before its six-beat meter changes to five beats and Solange and Sampha each repeatedly sing an enigmatic line: “You’ve got to know.” And with hovering piano chords and hissing cymbal, “Down With the Clique” hints at the anticipation of Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” as Solange reminisces, “We were rollin’ up the street/Chasing the divine.”

In the interlude “Can I Hold the Mic,” Solange explains, rhapsodically: “I can’t be a singular expression of myself. There’s too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers, so many …” A keyboard follows each syllable of that speech, soon joined by chords to harmonize. The lilt of her voice alone could have carried these few seconds of content, but she and her musicians made the effort to match the rhythm and find its song. Because Houston is not her only home on this album; music is.