Hot on the heels of August’s jerky “Fast Fashion” comes another confounding madness from Lolina, aka Inga Copeland. Less abstract than its predecessor, “Face the Music” hews closer to Lolina’s Hype Williams-era songwriting, coating discernible songs in surrealist poetics and edgy pop subversion. The title track offsets bone dry programmed drums and electric piano improvisations with ritualistic chants; music that sounds like parody and deadly serious outsider art all at once.

‘Forget it Left Bank’ is better yet, a brain-scraping rap-no-wave freakout that’s lysergic and – almost – catchy too. Lolina’s deadpan half-rapped vocal is crucial: she sounds like ‘Rapture’-era Debbie Harry but gives off a couldn’t-care-less iciness of Tricky, slurring over a dollar bin hammond loop that’s as perfectly skewed as anything on Leila’s first couple of albums. Her tightrope walk is most visible here, as she teeters from pop coherence into freeform, reality-bending outlandishness, dropping the beat for lighters-in-the-air neo-psychedelia at almost random intervals.

The pristine rap-not-rap atmosphere continues on the eerily polished ‘Music is the Drug (Album Version)’, a nu jack jammer that almost transcends its own strangeness. If you’re not listening intently you might confuse it with pop music – Lolina’s earworm chorus is catchy enough – but as always her touches poke the music just outside acceptable boundaries. This time it’s dissonant jazz fusion blasts, and a prolonged outro that reverses the entire thing into a dragging solo shimmy.

It’s an unwitting key to understanding “Face the Music”, an album that on the surface might be the most straightforward set of songs Lolina has assembled – a virtual sequel to 2019’s relatively nimble electro-pop influenced “The Smoke”, but lurking in the shadows there’s just as much seductive dissociation as the headmashing “Live in Geneva” or “Fast Fashion”. Huge recommendation.