Like many musicians suddenly stuck at home, the London experimental producer Loraine James seems to have taken the pandemic as the opportunity for a creative reset. In March, she sifted through her hard drive and came up with six outtakes from her astonishing 2019 album For You & I, which she uploaded alongside a whole other album she had left on the cutting-room floor. In May, she dropped Bangers and Mash, a five-track EP of mind-bending club cuts and edits. “Last random ep for a while,” she wrote, but she apparently changed her mind in July, when she returned with Hmm, another five-tracker (“ok actually the last random ep of the year”), this time turning her hand to convoluted synth-and-drum workouts reminiscent of the peak years of Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label.

“Don’t You See It?” is the lead single from James’ forthcoming Nothing EP for Hyperdub, and it marks a distinct shift in her music. For one thing, it prominently features a guest vocalist, which not many of James’ previous songs have done. In this case, it’s HTRK’s Jonnine Standish behind the mic, and there’s something about her breathy voice and melancholy tone that faintly recalls Dani Siciliano’s work on Herbert’s Bodily Functions. This is among the moodiest of James’ productions to date: The tempo is slow, the beats stumble, and the reverberant piano chords are full of wounded feeling. But lovelorn ballads don’t often have the kind of energy that “Don’t You See It?” does. James’ drums stutter and lurch, as though desperately grasping out in search of a solid handhold. And where Standish’s voice suggests cool clarity, James’ production is thick and murky, full of down-pitched samples and metallic thumps. It’s an unusual merger of styles that somehow makes for a perfect fit: bruising beats for a bruised heart.