In the catchy, multilayered “1 Night,” meditative gongs overlap a stop-start vocal line from Charli XCX as she depicts a complicated situation. She thought she was determined to shun commitment — “I’m not the type of girl who wants serious affection” — but after a memorable one-night stand, she has discovered that she wants more. Yet that leaves her vulnerable, unsure of how her partner feels: “Do you wanna go back?” she wonders.

In both music and lyrics, “Mura Masa” is an album full of approach and evasion, of connections that are tantalizingly tentative. “What if I Go,” with vocals from Bonzai, starts with what promises to be a hip-hop beat, but by midway through the first verse, it has fallen away, leaving her to sing over a simple ticking beat and pointillistic chords; she insists, “Wherever you go, I’m going with you, babe,” but it’s unclear whether she’ll get the chance. “Second 2 None,” sung by Christine and the Queens (a.k.a. Héloïse Letissier), is even sparser, a heartbreak song that may be an elegy, with countermelodies in flutes and steel drums appearing and vanishing around Ms. Letissier’s voice.

Mura Masa has a world of instruments and sounds to draw on, and a confident craftsman’s sense of what to include and what to leave out. His songs also understand that no system can contain or predict the vagaries of the human heart.