“If I can’t get an angle / Tell me, how am I supposed to feel?” Bartees Strange asks with trepidation on his new album, Horror, which comes out on Friday with 4AD. He doesn’t just capture one, but many angles on this stellar new release, resurrecting Prince at times with his funky, sugar-coated guitars and vocals, channeling Bon Iver at other times, in both the lower and higher ranges, with the same gravitas and imagination.

He said that the album “is just me trying to connect. I’m trying to shrink the size of the world. I’m trying to feel close—so I’m less afraid.” Nonetheless, it finds him thinking about myriad of places to live, like on the song “Baltimore,” which weighs the pros and cons of living in cities like LA, NYC, DC, and Toronto. It finds him hitting the road a number of times, like on his hit single, “Lie 95,” where he sings, “I been searching / for someone to love / now we’re folded / and I can’t get enough / I feel focused / On lifting you up.”

As sad and honest as the album gets, dealing with his fears of living in America as a black man (“I get scared of erasure ‘cos it / Just seems to happen, don’t it?”), dealing with the challenge it is to be a well-known creative with introversive tendencies (“I’ve done too much, biting my tongue / It’s really hard to be alone…”), and as varied as the sonic palette on the album can be, even within one song, it is ultimately an uplifting album, with many a hook and many a lyric to light up your soul.

At twelve tracks, it covers a myriad of genres, from rock to rap, synthesizer to soul, and there are many layers to the music, finding Bartees sometimes singing low and high parts over each other, to fill out the sound. The album title, Horror, and the horror movie-esque cover, give a bit of context for the songs, but it really seems to deal with everyday fears, like relationships, how we come across to other people, and the fight that it is to survive, particularly as a person of color.

While it is a bit more edgy lyrically than the stuff that came out in the 80s and 90s, it would fit right into the soulful rock n roll that has become a staple in the rock n roll canon. It is forward-looking and backward-looking at the same time, in sound. It is a triumphant record, despite its sometimes-dark themes, something that convinces with both its humble honesty and its soaring ambition.

Pre-order Horror by Bartees Strange HERE