If there’s one modern songwriter to reflect on the world’s beauty, it’s Cassandra Jenkins. Her delightful and peaceful 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature concerned itself with the small mundanities of being alive — a new bikini, a three-legged dog, and seven minutes of birdsong that fill the closer “The Ramble.” Its standout, though, the marvelous “Hard Drive” incorporated spoken-word elements from Jenkins, her therapist, and relayed conversations she had around New York with security guards and bookkeepers. She had a tough act to follow, but her gorgeous and serene third album, My Light, My Destroyer, keeps the same starry-eyed romanticism and fills her music with new sounds.

Jenkins’ voice is perfectly soothing, and she goes to such extreme softness in some tracks that they’re perfect companions to fall asleep to, or just take a breather. Over waves of saxophone and blankets of sound, lead single “Only One” assures devotion to a partner: “You are the only one I’ve ever loved / The only one I know how to love.” She has a stint working at a flower shop on “Delphinium Blue,” where the spoken-word sections from the previous album return to instruct, “Chin up, stay on task, wash the windows, count the cash.” And on “Omakase,” she expands the album’s title to reflect the full multitudes of her partner, saying they’re “My lover, my light, my destroyer, my meteorite.” It’s divinely serene, especially when the music slows and she reflects on the difficulties of a touring life: “I dreamt you fed me / Omakase berries / I dreamt we were coyotes / Licking the seeds off our teeth / And I woke up / In the heat of Phoenix / Wish you could’ve seen it.”

Much of My Light, My Destroyer laments on traveling life, based on the success of An Overview of Phenomenal Nature, but it also gives Jenkins ample time to write about her immediate surroundings, imbuing them with a sense of purpose and meaning that only poets can pull off. She stares at her name getting pulled off the theater marquee in “Aurora, IL,” while watching planes overhead, and she also details William Shatner’s trip to space. “A billionaire in Texas / Built a rocket ship / To send the oldest man in space up / On a pleasure trip,” she sings, but the trip was life-changing in its perspective-switching; it filled him with grief, sudden clarity of the immensity we’re faced with, where Earth looks miniscule in comparison. Jenkins uses this to examine her own problems, putting them into perspective: “It’s a thin line / Over the planet / …Between us and nothingness.”

She drifts in and out of hotel bars and beaches on “Clams Casino,” but “Petco” is the ultimate search for meaning within the aloneness; turning to some form of companionship, visits pet stores to see the animals. As the therapist on “Hard Drive” mentioned, “When we lose our connection to nature, we lose our humanity.” Her lyricism here is so affecting that it’s worth quoting at length: “I wander through the pet store / Asking, ‘What is my true nature?’ / Can I take care of anything or anyone I’m eyeing? / Don’t wanna take you home / Just ’cause I’m trying to be / Less alone, less alone.” It’s an immediately gripping song that reads like fiction, charming and completely replayable.

My Light, My Destroyer is louder than An Overview on Phenomenal Nature; on here, she experiments with indie rock (“Petco,” “Aurora, IL,” “Clams Casino”) as well as her signature ambient pop sound, but tracks like “Devotion” and “Hayley,” along with a multitude of interludes, bookend the record with a softness that you can expect from Jenkins. There’s nothing as divine here as with “Hard Drive,” but there are certainly moments of perfection where it feels like the world stops to hear a melody from a particular song: the pang of emotion that comes at the onset of the second chorus of “Only One,” the downcast, pensive note that kicks off “Tape and Tissue,” the gritty crunch of guitars at the end of “Delphinium Blue” over the orchestral singing. Not only those, but the record is littered with one-liners and gorgeous turns of phrase that make Jenkins one of the best songwriters working today — up there with Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift with no hesitation.

My Light, My Destroyer is as good of a follow-up as it gets — solid, effortlessly gorgeous, and sparkling with a love for life and an appreciation of all of its turbulent and spectacular moments. We’re lucky to be alive at the same time Cassandra Jenkins is making music; her insight is endless, wise, and harmoniously in tune with the flux of the world.

order My Light, My Destroyer by Cassandra Jenkins HERE