The light outside Amelia Meath’s window on a coast-to-coast flight in 2019 must have been something to behold. By the time the North Carolina-based singer-songwriter touched down in Los Angeles, she’d written an entire song about the eerie glow that accompanies nightfall, as streetlights flicker and television sets illuminate living-room windows across America. Instead of saving the song for her duo Sylvan Esso, Meath recorded it in L.A. with Southern California guitar virtuoso Blake Mills; backed with a version by saxophonist Sam Gendel, the single is the inaugural release on Sylvan Esso’s new label Psychic Hotline.

Meath and Mills tracked the song in a single session, then proceeded to tinker with the project on their computers, little by little, over the next two years; that extended process plays out in an intriguing blend of spontaneity and reflection. At the song’s core, acoustic guitar and brushed drums lay down a tentative hush around Meath’s equally subdued singing as she sketches a scene of eerie stillness: “Living room glowing through/Family barely moving/RGB in the gloom/Pulling at us from our sleeping.” But as the song unfolds, your senses seem to adjust to the penumbra and blurry shapes stir in the shadows: Meath’s soft vocal harmonies; watery waves of synthesizer; a momentary flash of horns. Blake’s fretless baritone guitar ripples like a reflection in a darkened window. The whole song, in fact, shares the diffuse, dreamlike quality of his 2020 album Mutable Set.

Meath sketches the scene in broad strokes, inviting you to fill the gaps around simple, imagistic phrases: an alleyway in the rain, a game of pickup hoops. As she reaches the song’s climax, she admits, “I wait to feel it nightly/Most folks pretend it isn’t here at all.” When she sings the titular phrase, her voice goes high and distant, like a fluorescent streak in your peripheral vision. It’s a scene of twilit intrigue out of an Edward Hopper painting.