On Barbara, Barrie Lindsay’s first self-produced album, and second under the moniker Barrie, she battles the loss of a parent, the start of a new relationship, and the impulse to separate herself from her music. This result is a beautifully peculiar, and quietly ambitious collection of synth-pop, art-pop, indie rock and folk songs that reflect a new willingness to let listeners into her world.

After the first iteration of Barrie released the debut album Happy To Be Here in 2019 as a five piece, Lindsay reintroduced Barrie as a solo project. This decision coincided with two events that redefined Lindsay’s life and shaped Barbara. In the summer of 2019, she met her now-wife, the musician Gabby Smith. Simultaneously, Lindsay’s father learned that his lung cancer had worsened. In January of 2020, she moved home to Ipswich to spend time with family and begin work on her album. Three months became nine, thanks to the pandemic. Lindsay wrote Barbara while quarantining with Smith in Maine, while her father was dying, and while she was falling in love.

Lindsay didn’t initially plan to write about her father on Barbara. “Music is what I do for fun, to distract, to be happy,” she says. But reflecting on the kind of music she admires, she concluded: “Knowing that the song came from somewhere real is what makes it compelling.” Lindsay finds catharsis from the ambivalent desperation of losing a parent on the album’s centerpiece, “Dig.” You can hear her newfound boldness as she wails the song’s central refrain, giving herself over to emotion: “I can’t get enough of you / Where did you come from?”

Despite the grief, personal and collective on Lindsay’s mind while making Barbara, she often pauses to embrace joy. “Jenny,” is a simple, acoustic guitar ode to meeting Smith. Similarly, her fantasy of a romantic but bloodied afternoon, “Quarry,” sounds eerie and aqueous, before erupting into a euphoric geyser of synth and drums. She collected nearly a dozen instruments, including dulcimer, mandolin, clarinet, flute, cello, trumpet and her late grandmother’s harp to create the varied soundscapes on Barbara. She delights in manipulating their sounds beyond recognition, stretching them into vast, textured canvases.

“Barbara isn’t an album specifically about grief or love. It’s just an album where I let myself actually feel my emotions,” Lindsay says. “That was something I’d never done before in music.” Barbara is out March 25, 2022 via Winspear.