Wanna talk about tUnE-yArDs?

You know when you hear something that hits so close to your softest innards that you feel like you’ve been suckerpunched and liked it? And like you kind of want to feel it again? Guys, I haven’t been this excited about an album in SO LONG. I think Merrill Garbus might be brilliant, but god is it hard to listen to a lot of her songs in a row. I promise you won’t hear another album so challenging but so rewarding for the rest of the year. Ready? Let’s go.

Garbus’s first album under the tUnE-yArD moniker was BiRd-BrAiNs, a self-released series of experimental pop tunes featuring ukulele, her impossible voice, and a delay pedal. On her second album, w h o k i l l, (out today on 4AD)Garbus dumps the minimalism for all the noise, noise, noise, noise she can muster. When you’re not clutching your head, you’ll be hand-to-heart, swooning. You’ll take a dance break to ponder the start-and-stop nature of every song. The horns and drums are clipped while Garbus’s voice simmers and roll and howls like a furious tea kettle, and without warning she’ll slip into an easy trill as gentle as early morning birdsong. She has as much in common with Michael Jackson as Vampire Weekend or a chipwave band, but she is thrillingly intelligent and self-aware.

She’s weird. Her music is fucking weird. But there’s so much to it that I’m absolutely enthralled by. I want to be her! Everything is deeply personal and yet strongly political. Garbus herself explained it in an interview with the Village Voice last year; after spending time in Kenya, she struggled because “I feel a great connection to Africa, and yet I have no right to speak Swahili, which, at that point, I did. I have no right to be myself, to let out any of the things that were inside of me.” But again as an American, she acknowledges the baggage associated with her connections to Africa and her African influences: “I think the whole point is that we borrow from Africa, but we also, as Americans, steal from Africa, and that’s something I want to stop, and we need—economically and socially and politically, we need to deal with those aspects, because music is not isolated from all of those things.”

Yes! Fuck yes! How can I be myself when my best self is caught up in the actions of so many others, ESPECIALLY political action that I oppose but can’t change? I struggle with that on the regular, and if Garbus has any advice, I am all ears. Total dreamboat, am I right? She displays an awareness and sense of justice uncommon in pop music, and the breadth of feeling in her work astounds. The New York Times compared her voice to Aretha Franklin and Yoko Ono, but for more contemporary parallels, I’d give her M.I.A.’s furor and Nellie McKay’s cheek.

On “My Country,” she rages in a way that I think many young people can identify with, questioning her own identity as an American when there’s so much associated with that historically and presently. “My country ’tis of thee/ sweet land of liberty/ How come I cannot see my future within your arms?” she asks, then “We cannot all have it/ now why is there juice dripping under your chin?/ When you have something, why do they have nothing?” Other songwriters have grappled with these internal conflicts of identity and capitalism and privilege; it’s just not usually so danceable!

“Es-So” explores gender performance, and possibly prostitution, with Garbus singing in the most carefree timbre that she feels free, despite “babies crying” and “do-or-dying” then asking, “I gotta do right if my body’s tight—right?” And has there ever been a more succinct concession to the establishment than “I run over my own body with my own car”? Garbus subsumes her most elemental self to politics, consumption, convenience, capitalism, global corporatism, war in the Middle East, all embodied in that great American symbol. (The second-best was definitely Lisa Simpson’s plaint, “I know all this focus on thinness is unhealthy and anti-feminist, but that’s what a fat girl would say!”)

“Gangsta” is tUnE-yArDs’ “Paper Planes,” the joy of expression clashing with the anger inherent in the song. “What’s a boy to do if he’ll never be a gangster… what’s a girl to do if she’ll never be a rock star?” Garbus asks, diving again into that space between our internal desires and our external expression of self. Over sirens and gunshots she repeats an ominous threat to would-be gentrifiers: ”Never move to my ‘hood, ’cause danger is crawling out the way.” Yet, over and over she admits that her protagonists will “never make a sound” if you do.

After that three-song onslaught, Garbus steps back slightly. She began by politicizing the personal, and seamlessly transitions into personalizing the political. “Don’t take my life away!” she pleads on “Bizness,” the album’s first single. The next track “Doorstep” is an outright fucking abuser of a song. Garbus has stripped it completely bare, leaving little more than her voice and the saddest story of all, summarized right to the gut with the one-line chorus: “Policemen shot my baby as he crossed over my doorstep.”

Ok, the album is definitely front-loaded, with the best songs giving way to others that are merely very, very good, but I think that’s a deliberate move on Garbus’s part. Either you’re in or you’re out for tUnE-yArDs. After years of open mics and street performance, she knows she has to grab the listener and keep them attentive until they “get” what she’s doing, and that’s just how she lays out this album.

Bookending her album with songs that I suspect are more autobiographical than the others, on album closer “Killa,” tUnE-yArDs writes her feminist anthem. “I’m a new kind of woman/ I’m a new kind of woman/ I’m a don’t-take-shit-from-you kind of woman,” she growls over a meta chorus calling itself “something that will soothe you.” Counting the tongue-in-cheek breakdown where Garbus laments “in this day and age” not having more  male, black friends, then devolves into talk about yuppies in their natural habitat or something, “Killa” feels like at least three songs held together only through force of personality, and fortunately, Garbus has more than enough to go around.

She has talked about wanting to be “physically moved” by music, and the importance of performing even her intimate lyrics, her indelicate and unseemly vocals alone on stage to serve as a model other women in music. If I could find more words to describe why I can’t stop listening to tUnE-yArDs, well, I’d be using them to write professionally.

And if that’s not enough to love, she produced the Thao and Mirah album also out today AND she wrote a song about Top Chef!