I Need to Start a Garden, Portlander Haley Heynderickx’s 2018 debut album, introduced her as a songwriter capable of placing millennial struggles on the historic timeline. She could paint God as a woman with a knock-off Coach bag who’s fluent in Nintendo 63—twisting the number for a rhyme. Cobbling together Biblical allegories and internet snake oil, she could ask in a way that demanded listening, What the hell am I supposed to do with all of this? How could anyone make a life with so many competing approaches promised as the very best way to make a life? She did it with a songbird’s voice, honed as a churchgoing kid, and finger-style chops on par with any folksy guitarist out there, honed in adoration of the late influential guitarist John Fahey. Her generation’s problems were as old as time, yet unique and urgent; and her songs sounded both timeless and nervily modern. The nasty web of consumerism and the internet’s drive for optimization expanded the omnivore’s dilemma into oblivion. “I’m tired of my mind getting heavy with mold,” she sang out. What to do? Start a garden, of course; it’s what the internet would prescribe, and the Bible.

Heynderickx hit on a moment, and managed to make art with staying power about this hyper-compounded angst created in the internet’s vacuum. Her open questions rang out, critics loved them, listeners loved them, and then six years passed without a follow-up.

Nevertheless, Seed of a Seed, her sophomore album out November 1, picks up right where she left off, testing pop-existentialism against her personal struggles. On the opening track, “Gemini,” owning the two-faced trope of that astrological sign, she sings of “a woman in the corner claiming she is just the former one of me.” Maybe this is the garden-variety duality one might read of on Co-Star. But it’s easy to see that woman in the corner as Heynderickx before her success, a recent PSU grad playing casual gigs around Portland, next to present-day Heynderickx, a burgeoning celebrity with a hundred million fans listening to her songs on Spotify.

Until now, Heynderickx’s recordings, while thrilling, sounded as if they were trying to sort out what they wanted to be. On “The Bug Collector,” her detuned nylon strings thrummed a tidy blues while she recited a breathy spell about a praying mantis in your bathtub that’s no doubt a “priest from a past life out to getcha.” Then, an electric guitar’s open chords jangled through a doo-wop chorus on “Oom Sha La La.” And then an arpeggiated piano led “Show You a Body” through its abstracted starts and stops.

By contrast, Seed of a Seed is remarkably sure of itself. Heynderickx and her steel string acoustic are the lead lines throughout nearly every song, fingernails chugging against the strings, her lyrics bouncing with a big-room reverb, and spare instrumentation lifting her performance up. Each song is precisely crafted, a polished object you could pick up and hold in your hands. But they keep their gesture through all this sculpting. Performing live—and alone—seems to be her natural state, and she maintains the off-kilter tempo of a soloist on this record. On “Mouth of a Flower,” a song dealing with the familiar struggle of desire and contentment, she slows conversationally before charging ahead in a plucky vamp with staccato cello following her lead. “We take and we take and we take,” her haunting voice warbles between, pulling the whole thing taut like an elegant bow. I would believe her if she said it took all six years to arrange these songs.

This cohesive sound magnifies Heynderickx’s enchanting power as a performer, which makes her flickering musical turns and cheekily anachronistic lyrics a jolt that mirrors what it feels like to move through our confused world. One moment you’re swept up in her agile singing and impossibly complex compositions, studying the sound of her fingers sliding across strings, and the next she lets out a scream about being addicted to her phone. You’re lost in a novel until someone at the next table starts watching TikToks at full volume. In “Redwoods (Anxious God),” Heynderickx chats with nettle leaves and walnut trees; the garden has become a forest. This type of interspecies conversation was once normal, they tell her, before being interrupted: “the only man here’s cell phone ring ring rings.” And so launches a wordless chorus. “Doo do, do de doo do,” it skips along like a fairy tale.

A confident tone rides over the album. Sonically and lyrically, it seems Heynderickx has figured something out. It’s not that she has The Answers. (The album is called Seed of a Seed, not Farmers Market Stall.) But she has some. They aren’t round and satisfying; you can’t hold them in your hands and appreciate their beauty like one of her songs. Instead, they tell you what to do when there are no clean answers, which is always.

Her advice—and it’s good advice—is to do the best you can. She hopes for a simple life on the album’s title track: “A glass of wine / And if I’m lucky / Maybe a hand next to mine.” Much of the album is a wish for the everyday pleasures Heynderickx presumably once took for granted, which seem to slip away as she becomes this new thing, a rock star of sorts, or maybe just an adult. The songs feel like an attempt to encapsulate the messiness of the world. And they do, to a degree, but they’re only able to do that by acknowledging how misguided that desire is. Maybe it’s possible to get close to something like perfection inside the two or three minutes of a song, but life itself could never be so buttoned up.