“Futures,” the first single off Wendy Eisenberg’s first album for Ba Da Bing!, Auto, feels like at least two songs in one, and also like it’s just scratching the surface. Trained in jazz, Eisenberg has released a solo album of exploratory guitar improvisations (2018’s Its Shape Is Your Touch) and a trio album of frenetic improv for John Zorn’s Tzadik label (The Machinic Unconscious, also 2018). They’ve gone further out as part of the experimental quintet Gloyd (July’s beautifully berserk SubGloydals 2020), and led the Western Massachusetts “avant butt-rock” band Editrix. Eisenberg has also released two solo albums of exquisitely off-kilter bedroom-pop songs (2017’s Time Machine and this past April’s Dehiscence). For all that, their work is probably best-known from the mathy noise-punk band Birthing Hips.

On “Futures,” Eisenberg exercises restraint as they combine elements from their impressively varied career. Their knotty guitar riffs suggest prime Deerhoof, while their conversational vocal delivery brings to mind the intimacy of Frankie Cosmos. Two-thirds of the way through, a crowd roars, the bustling drums ramp up their intensity, and Eisenberg starts thrashing away. “Another basement show,” they half-shrug, half-whoop, drenched in echoey effects; cheers ensue again. “I love hearing where someone is,” Eisenberg told The Wire, and “Futures” sounds both like live musicians playing in a room and like some oddball fictional setting. But it’s all coolly enigmatic, and it breezes past in two and a half minutes, leaving plenty of time afterward to puzzle over the ominous closing lines: “I didn’t notice that/I didn’t notice that/My enemies are finally real.” Given the attention to detail that Eisenberg displays, it’s difficult to imagine them not noticing anything.