Lyra Pramuk started singing at a young age, yet she always felt like a musical outsider. She cut her teeth in Pennsylvania church choirs before attending conservatory, her ostensible plan to be an operatic baritone; in her 20s, she shifted gears and became a denizen of Berlin dancefloors. Her destination has always been more idiosyncratic than anything she could find in a particular medium, genre, or career model. “I only set out to make an album because everyone told me I had to,” Pramuk self-effacingly told The Quietus in 2020, hot on the heels of her now-classic debut, Fountain. “I’ve been very much in my own world, so I feel kind of naïve about all of this. I’m more likely to want to talk about Susan Sontag or aesthetics.”

Fountain was composed entirely of Pramuk’s voice, which she manipulated, distorted, and layered. It was a minimal album, not necessarily in the vein of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, nor because it sounded stripped down—Pramuk created a cavernous, haunting sense of space out of just one instrument. Her secret sauce was software, yet Fountain smacked of ancient feats of ingenuity, reminiscent of the way cultures that persisted for millennia without modern technology could create mind-boggling works from sparse natural resources. The record’s lush vocals feel even more prophetic today than they did five years ago—Pramuk harvested the digital fruits of the nascent 2020s to nourish herself for the deprivations of an unknown future.

Her follow-up fosters a similarly organic sensibility, though it takes a different route to the core. Hymnal is unabashedly maximalist: Pramuk embraces varied collaborators, including chamber ensemble the Sonar Quartett, and processes drawn from literature, visual art, and botany. Her vocal performance emerged from a set of unconventional instructions: She used verse by the poet Nadia Marcus as the basis for a “geographical biology experiment” she built with the artist Jenna Sutela. This sculpture-cum-habitat was littered with Marcus’ words, on top of which Pramuk placed oats; she then documented the growth of a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, while it overtook the grains, letting its path dictate the lyrics. Pramuk’s intricate, labor-intensive technique places her in a long lineage of composers who use chance operations and alternative musical notation systems, though her score singularly fits her vision. Life, she tells us, finds a way.

Hymnal is a planet of sound, teeming with life, that seems even more habitable than Fountain—a bountiful ecosystem experiencing a permanent May and June. The album’s execution is tech-forward, yet tactile. Wielding a CDJ, Pramuk plaits violin, viola, cello, flute, double bass, and handclaps into her own treated singing and speech. The seeds of the LP are human, packed with the same mystifying DNA as its predecessor: Pramuk’s voice, which feels incantatory, and maintains its personhood past the augmentation of technology and the constancy of change.

The way Pramuk uses her pipes as raw material is distinctive. She frequently sings or speaks in indiscernible syllables that suggest a postmodern vocalese. Her words become scrutable on centerpiece “Meridian,” but their pitch shifts dramatically in a short span, sinking into a register that feels impossibly low, but not enough to disfigure the bodily origin of her utterances. “Licking the sun/Licking soil,” she intones, yet the nouns soon begin to blur, ground and sky coming together as her tone dips further and then climbs into a higher range.

In part, the mutability of her voice is the product of a realization Pramuk has discussed in interviews: As a trans woman who started taking hormones during adulthood, her voice could never become stereotypically feminine merely from estrogen-based therapy. Her performance on Hymnal twists away from normative expectations and toys with gender’s fabrication. On the aptly titled “Reality,” her pitched-down humming sounds artificial, exaggeratedly rich. The computerized and the fleshy question each other, and ultimately figure out a way to speak in tandem—much as they do, for better or worse, in actuality.

If Hymnal’s imagination is post-human, its roots are in the European classical tradition, which has a history of foregrounding string arrangements to indicate the replenishment of spring. Opener “Rewild” immediately establishes a chordophone theme, only to bury such analog melodies across the record’s first half. As the album continues, its cycles of motif and progression seem to move faster and faster, outpacing humanity’s concept of seasons. The album feels more fructuous than the Earth and more cleansing and optimistic than the effects that climate change is predicted to have on it. The Sonar Quartett slips back to the surface on “Meridian,” while the prominent bowing on “Swallow,” “Umbra,” and “Solace” indicate further fecundity, more flushes and blooms. The disc shines with destruction’s opposite—a sci-fi verdancy. Pramuk considers not only the subsistence of species—whether single-celled or homo sapiens—but their flourishing: Here, the album finds its wide-scoped notion of hope.

One method for enduring a present of ecological disaster, cynical applications of consequential technology, and constant political upheaval is to look beyond one’s own historical moment at the broader workings of time. Using the lenses of enduring customs, Pramuk’s music has the courage to peer ahead. She points far past the limits of being a soul with its own circumstances toward a more challenging truce between people and apparatus, society and nature. Hymnal is a truly existential record, but not because it ponders the trials and conundrums of individuals—that would be philosophically old-school, an inhibiting vestige of the 20th Century. Pramuk’s subject is the phenomenon of life itself.