“Crushing”

Since 2015, Eartheater has specialized in elemental avant-pop songs that span the alienating, insular experiments of 2018’s Irisiri to the folky, operatic meditations of 2020’s Phoenix. In each one, she is a siren waving sailors across turbulent waters, coaxing the listener deeper into her world. Her new album, Powders, smoothes out her roughest edges, blissed out and streamlined. Early highlight “Crushing” is a calming sea of trip-hop. Against pillowing percussion and romantic strings, Eartheater addresses a man in her crosshairs, folding her words like origami. “You’re the turn on that I can’t refuse/You’re the fuse that detonates my body,” she sighs. Only in an Eartheater song would relatively abstract lines about pearls and wine glasses sit comfortably next to a blunt compliment like “You’re a guy that eats pussy well.” The cumulative effect is one of hypnosis.