For a dozen years, Merrill Garbus’ eclectic agit-pop project has bounded through volatile lyrical terrain. “hold yourself.,” the second single from sketchy.—Tune-Yards’ upcoming fifth album—doesn’t shy away from either of those tendencies, exactly. But it’s also elegant and, by Tune-Yards standards, understated in a way we haven’t heard from Garbus and her longtime collaborator, bassist and husband Nate Brenner, for a long time.

From the homemade intimacy of 2009’s Bird-Brains to the kitchen-sink hyper-consciousness of 2018’s I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, Tune-Yards’ trajectory has been toward expansion. Yet “hold yourself.” reaches out by turning back inward. Centered around Garbus’ powerhouse vocals, the gauzy, bass-heavy beat ballad delivers a potent message of self-empowerment: The sins of our forefathers are in our own hands, not anyone else’s. An album ago, this might have come off as didactic, but it doesn’t here because Garbus is talking to herself, as well as a child she says she can’t have. “We all have trouble being brave enough to turn the page,” Garbus acknowledges. “But we will.” In the closing seconds, a customary Tune-Yards clatter returns; even the trendily lower-cased and punctuated title harks back to the typographical oddities of an artist originally stylized as tUnE-yArDs.

Garbus has been communing with a smaller indie world since the days of Occupy, and she tiptoed toward Hollywood with the deliriously off-kilter score for Boots Riley’s 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. Now, she’s belting this weirdly joyful hymn to self-doubt, muddling through this moment with the ambiguity it demands. As Garbus sang more than a decade ago, on the first song many critics heard from Tune-Yards, “I am not magic yet/But I am in bloom at the end of the world.”