In the wake of his 2023 album An Inbuilt Fault, Will Westerman lost his booking agent, his manager, and his momentum. The record represented a dramatic departure from the low-key sophisti-pop of his 2018 breakthrough “Confirmation” and 2020 debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead; co-produced by Big Thief drummer James Krivchenia, it was instead a dense, meticulously recorded collection of labyrinthine folk whittled down from a series of improvisational jams. Luckily, Westerman was already working on a new batch of songs with engineer and producer Marta Salogni, who had mixed Inbuilt Fault. Going into the new material, the goal was not to overthink anything. They spent five weeks recording on the Greek island of Hydra—Westerman, born in England, lived in Athens before moving to Milan—and seeking a balance between his poppier debut and headier followup. The result, A Jackal’s Wedding, is his most distinctive release to date. While he initially garnered attention for his pastiches of ’80s art-rock, he’s channeled his influences into a record that’s both more expansive and more intimate.

These are heady songs, but with Salogni at the helm, they’re the most polished Westerman’s music has ever sounded. He listened to Brian Eno and John Cale’s Wrong Way Up while making the album, and recreating that record’s spaciousness with the occasional contemporary flourish places him alongside other oddballs like Mk.gee or King Krule. The upbeat synths of the arpeggio-heavy “PSFN” (which stands for “Pop Song, For Now”) sound like an old instructional video, but the way the drums lightly pump the entire mix is a distinctly modern touch. “Spring,” a love song to his wife, is so straightforward that he joked about offering it to Adele. That directness—the pop half of sophisti-pop—is a big part of the record’s charm.

Some of the wooziness of Westerman’s early work is still here. Intro “S. Machine” teases a more off-kilter album, with erratic synthetic horns that land somewhere between 22, a Million and an Animusic DVD. What follows is more soothing, but with added complexity from Warpaint and Kurt Vile drummer Stella Mozgawa. Her layers of drums and percussion capture Westerman’s restlessness on “Adriatic,” while her subtle dropped beats on “Mosquito” lend a sense of dread to the song’s serenity. Westerman’s lyrics are often difficult to interpret, but his singing sounds clearer than ever: Unlike the last two records, he frequently dips into his lower range, exchanging the Bon Iver-esque falsetto for something closer to the range of Stephen Merritt. That shift helps land a genuinely funny moment on “Adriatic” where he announces, “I head back to Ithaca,” then dramatically intones, “not New York.”

It all comes together on“Weak Hands,” the first track Westerman worked on with Salogni and his best since “Confirmation.” It’s an existential crisis of a song, musing on an unnamed figure’s impending mortality: “Look at you running, my friend, to that desert in the sky… My dear, my hologram, my lord of mirrors/It’s coming.” The rudimentary synths of Your Hero Is Not Dead return, now treated like the ornate arrangements of Inbuilt Fault, a surreal wall of sound grounded by Ben Reed’s lightly overdriven bass. “Weak Hands” still calls back to Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel, and all the other art-rock totems Westerman has been compared to. But in its unconventional collection of those influences, and in his unvarnished delivery of the song’s esoteric lyrics, it feels like something new.