Though she has spent nearly four decades as an icon of nonchalant alt-rock cool, Kim Deal is no stranger to the big gesture. The indie-rock standard she penned as bassist of Pixies is called “Gigantic,” after all. When she struck out on her own with the Breeders, her hit, “Cannonball,” was about diving into hell and making the hugest possible splash. But Deal has never taken such unexpected swings as she does on Nobody Loves You More, her first proper solo album since becoming a fixture in the story of indie in 1986. Ninety seconds into the opening track, a full-blown brass section bursts in, announcing a different side of Deal, and unlocking the baroque-pop grandeur hidden in the heart of a slack-rock god.

Deal’s voice is a sly smile, sweet and tough, like candy and cigarettes. Holding rock’s loud-quiet surges at the impressionistic simmer of a punk Rothko, she remains an avatar for the power in being oneself, which often requires acceptance of the unknown, the possibility of the hard fall. She has accordingly spent recent interviews stating that her favorite part of art is failure. “Maybe not the failure itself,” Deal clarified, “but the stories that come from it.” She said elsewhere: “There’s something really sweet and endearing about somebody who got their ass kicked. They were out there trying.” The blistering blood harmonies of the Breeders—which Deal still helms with her twin sister Kelley—have by now traveled from the biker bars of Dayton, Ohio, to the arenas of both the In Utero and Guts tours. The chronicles of Deal’s “please-no-chops” entry into Pixies, gigging in her 1980s secretary clothes, are indie-rock folk tales. But risk has always been the subtext.

At times the lavish precision of Nobody Loves You More imagines Deal on an island masterminding her own meticulous Pet Sounds. Though she’s been Breeders’ primary songwriter for over three decades—and has likened her 1995 side-project the Amps, a lo-fi rock band, to a solo record—Nobody Loves You More is the first time she’s followed every sonic impulse and fully owned them, even as she’s joined by 20 other musicians. Deal strums a ukulele on the majestic orchestral ballad “Summerland.” She delivers a loose rap on the industrial “Big Ben Beat” and produces scorched dance-punk on “Crystal Breath.” Her adventurousness is grounded by candor. She wrote these eclectic songs between 2011 and 2022, years she spent home in Dayton caring for her ailing parents, who both passed shortly before the pandemic, and the album’s bittersweet tenor mixes grief, beauty, regret, and release, sometimes all at once. She repeatedly sings of wanting to duck out of her life to start over, longing for real change. “Show me what’s not possible/And I’ll come running,” Deal sings on the expressive “Come Running,” where she plays every unhurried instrument.

On “Coast,” Deal pairs blunt, end-of-the-road storytelling with a breezy melange of trombone and trumpet, creating the picture of the tropical trickster grinning through grim times. “Clearly, all of my life I’ve been foolish,” she sings over its midtempo sunshine pop, her rasp buoyed by the ornate arrangement. “Tried to hit hard, but I blew it/But it don’t even matter/It’s just human to want a way out/It’s human to wanna win.” What might otherwise sound like a harsh reflection becomes amiable wisdom in Deal’s delivery, horns like life savers bobbing among her mellow melodies. Deal has said that the song was inspired by her experience of attempting to dry out in Nantucket in the late ’90s—years when the Breeders’ momentum from the platinum-selling Last Splash was derailed by addiction struggles. Deal watched young townies surf, thinking, How nice to be a person doing things outside, in daylight! Her frank storytelling makes “Coast” the most vivid song on Nobody Loves You More, like the account of a beachside outlaw whose levity is its own triumph.

The best moments are when Deal slows her pace and stretches out like a daydream, recalling, more than any of her other bands, her sublime cover of Chris Bell’s “You And Your Sister” with This Mortal Coil in 1991. The stirring “Are You Mine?” is a ’50s-style doo-wop slow-burner inspired by a time that Deal’s mother, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s, passed her in the hall: Her query—“Are you mine? Are you my baby?”—became the song’s hazy hook, the pedal steel a welling tear. The languid chug of “Wish I Was” feels of a piece, like a lost psych-pop Love tune unapologetically yearning to get back to youth. These atmospheric songs hinge on tiny details: the rise of a Beatles-esque guitar solo, the heavenly harmonies pouring down, the sudden admission that “I may find deep regret waiting for me in the end.” Deal croons “Summerland” like an alt-rock Sinatra or post-grunge Gershwin filled with total wonder: “I hear music blowin’ in the breeze.”

The Rat Pack style of “Summerland” and the easy groove of “Coast” carry the reassuring memory of older generations; knowing that Deal penned these tunes while losing her parents, you understand why she would want to sink into such palliative spaces. The elegiac title track, too, feels like a sweeping ode to the way that, even when we are adrift in life, love becomes an anchor. Like most of Nobody Loves You More, its statement of abiding adoration also marks Deal’s final collaboration with her late friend Steve Albini, with whom she once worked on the eternal, howling high harmonies of “Where Is My Mind” and the Breeders’ sensory masterpiece, Pod. It’s endearing, profound even, that Nobody Loves You More found these no-frills indie legends tracking an orchestra and a marching band together at Electrical Audio—a radical left turn expanding our images of two artists better known for efficiency. What could be cooler?