Everything is content nowadays: crappy first dates, yapping with your friends, getting ready for work, getting ready for bed. Lucky for Jensen McRae, our output-obsessed digital ecosystem is one in which she thrives. She is not just a creator of incisive acoustic pop, but also a creator: Catch up with her on her podcast, or her Substack, or TikTok and “X,” where her occasional brushes with virality have bolstered her young music career.

The Los Angeles singer-songwriter has been compulsively tracking the minutiae of her life for much longer than she’s been posting. An avid journaler, she harbors a personal archive going back nearly a decade. And even before that, she understood her role as a scrupulous observer, largely as a means of managing feelings of otherness that stemmed from growing up Black in predominantly white environments. “I started to develop this identity of being a narrator and a collector of details about my life, about other people’s lives,” she told the New York Times recently. Put more bluntly on one song from her first album: “If I don’t write about it, was it really worth it?”

McRae’s sophomore album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, is a valiant bid to make heartbreak “worth it”: She forges her painstaking observations into armor and does battle with cruel exes and her own inner critic. Despite her Zillennial credentials and abundant digital savvy, McRae is engaged in a more timeless tradition—the breakup album—and taking notes from teachers like Taylor Swift and the firmament of sensitive, hyper-literate singer-songwriters that preceded her. Her first partnership with Brad Cook, producer du jour for writers of folky melodies and searching lyrics (Waxahatchee, Hurray for the Riff Raff), yields a tight, focused set of songs that bloom in the Pink Sugar air of Y2K soft-pop—but sometimes wilt from lyrical oversaturation.

Any appraisal of McRae’s work inevitably involves Phoebe Bridgers, a comparison of McRae’s own making. After her COVID-era tweet about a hypothetical Bridgers song blew up, McRae went ahead and wrote it herself; four years later, that track remains her second-most streamed on Spotify. The elder singer’s influence extends to songs that don’t explicitly mimic her, too. On I Don’t Know How, it’s in the frail opening bars and haunted, peripatetic imagery of “Savannah”; in the delicate blend of daydreams and nightmares on “Daffodils,” with its taut, wrenching encapsulation of cyclical abuse: “He cleaned my clock, he bought me daffodils.” The songs are simply arranged and sparsely populated; McRae is largely alone with her thoughts, or with men who are disappointing or something more sinister. Sometimes, as many do in the throes of heartbreak, she appeals to God.

Not everything is quite so grim. After “Daffodils” comes “Let Me Be Wrong,” a buoyant anthem for recovering Type As on which McRae captures the striver’s greatest fear (“Somеthing twisted in my chest/Says I’m good but not the best”) and releases it to the wind (“When I was young, that knocked me out/But nothing really shakes me now”). Strummy and sunlit, it could sit comfortably between “Wide Open Spaces” and “Standing Still” on a road trip playlist—an example of the bright, nostalgic pop palette McRae deploys across the album to help counterbalance its weightier material.

It’s impossible to get lost on I Don’t Know How, because Jensen is always dropping a pin: She’s speeding down Sunset Boulevard, on a flight to Georgia, in a bachelor pad in Shoreditch. Scene-setting is a core tenet of her craft, and a fitting technique for the story she’s telling. First or foundational heartbreak presents a paradox: It happens to everyone, but when it happens to you, it feels uniquely agonizing. Seeding her narrative with specifics is how McRae lays claim to it—this is no generic heartbreak, it is hers. At the same time, she cheekily uses details to signpost something more universal. That the wayward subject of “I Can Change Him” wears cheap cologne and hand rolls his cigarettes is hardly a surprise, and when McRae mentions “navy bed sheets” on the excellent morning-after missive “Novelty,” we know exactly what kind of guy she’s been spending the night with.

Such documentary instincts can make for dense lyrics. Yet the clarity and conviction with which Jensen sings draws your focus to every word. Her voice is expressive and pliable—soft and drifting one moment, grooved and throaty the next—and she seems to chew on each phrase that passes her lips, savoring it, making it sound irresistible. Only occasionally does she go overboard, as on “Tuesday,” a maudlin piano ballad where she invokes Judas and Brutus (a near-perfect rhyme, those bastards) to capture her own feelings of betrayal. Compared to the song’s relatively muted arrangement, McRae’s theatrical vocal performance here feels overwrought.

“Tuesday” drags down the back half’s batting average. So does closer “Massachusetts,” a relationship retrospective that largely amounts to an inventory of McRae’s ex’s property—a novelty ashtray, his guitars, preferred beers, and video games. The song’s glut of personally identifying details stemmed from a Swift-inspired songwriting exercise, she’s said—but perhaps she overcommitted to the assignment. In theory, her approach gets at the random but indelible memories that stick around far longer than the people we share them with. And individual lyrics, like the line about co-opted turns of phrase (“I wonder if your tongue is turning over anything I used to say”), are strong. But the song’s overall effect is of insularity, as if it was written for an audience of one—the only other person who could understand the deeper significance of the specifics.

As it turns out, “Massachusetts” wasn’t supposed to be on the album at all. McRae recorded the song and reluctantly added it to the track list after an early draft made the rounds on TikTok and was boosted by Justin Bieber. Herein lies a pitfall of being a songwriter in the creator economy: The lines between organic sharing and market testing become blurred; consumer logic encroaches on creative intuition. The algorithm bites the hand that feeds it. Should Jensen ever post a snippet of a song about that twisted relationship—I’ll be the first to reshare.