The title of London electronic musician Gaika’s new album, Seguridad, casts a glance back at an earlier release, 2016’s Security. The Spanish-language translation isn’t incidental: He recorded the new record while touring Mexico, and all nine tracks are collaborations with artists from Mexico City’s N.A.A.F.I label, which is putting out the release. Gaika’s sound, a style he has dubbed “ghetto futurism,” has always been international in scope, drawing from dancehall reggae and Caribbean soundsystem culture, Southern rap, and the abstract electronica of the Warp label, where he released several records between 2016 and 2019. With “Lord Zemel,” a highlight of the new release, familiar geographic mile markers continue to dissolve.

The song is a collaboration with Lechuga Zafiro, an Uruguayan artist who brings a particularly disorienting touch to N.A.A.F.I’s brand of psychedelic club-music styles. “Lord Zemel,” true to form, is provocative and strange. The triplet beat arrays tuned toms over loping bass drums, then fills in the area around them with soft, shimmering details: pinging triangles, brushed metal, the chirp of radio static. It’s both richly tactile and suggestively muffled, as though layers of cheesecloth had been draped over a table full of sharp objects. Over this unsettling backdrop, Gaika’s voice is run through Auto-Tune—a layer of digital obfuscation that cannot hide the hurt in his voice. “I saw a killer and a dead body/Both of them youths look just like me/So sad, so sad,” he sings at the song’s beginning, setting up a tragic conceit that finds completion in the verse’s conclusion: “It’s painful to touch/It’s painful to watch/When the rain falls on us/It’s ashes to dust.” Throughout the warbled repetitions of the chorus, he pleads with the angels above but always arrives at some variation of that final, earthly condemnation: “Ashes to dust” or “ashes to mud.” It’s a grim song and a sullen reckoning—with mortality, fate, maybe identity itself. There are no easy exits in its winding, mazelike path, yet Gaika’s wounded voice still lights the way.