If you thought Okay Kaya was taking liberties to question Dolly Parton on her last record, 2022’s SAP, then gird yourself for the targets on Kaya Wilkins’ fourth LP. “Picture This” begins by asking the listener to imagine themselves as “Sisyphus as a health-nut geologist” who is, once and for all, going to push that damn rock to the top. And the rock doesn’t like it one bit! “Who is this man with his clammy hands/And why is he defying/Gravity?” she sings from the once-victorious stone’s perspective. The 34-year-old Norwegian-American musician is here to rewrite the Greek myths, one nimble flip turning a 3000-year-old story into a neat wink about the fantasy of seizing control of one’s life; of conquering not just your health, but nature and fate. Better still, Wilkins doesn’t draw attention to how genuinely funny the lyrics are (“You want to be like your daddy/A rolling stone/Gain some speed and lose control,” she consoles the rock), instead all but smothering her run-on verses—sung in a head voice that suggests she’s low on oxygen—in languid, Moon Safari-worthy stardust.

If Camus wrote that we must imagine the perpetually failing Sisyphus as happy, Wilkins’ unburdened hero has to be experiencing some degree of delusion. Smaller, similarly blinkered battles between man and nature play out across Oh My God – That’s So Me. The title phrase comes from the last song, the folky hymnal “The Art of Poetry,” in which someone looks at the moon and, “struck by familiarity,” utters it out loud. To fluttery woodwinds and loudening strings, Wilkins repeats the phrase over and over, seemingly captivated and a little horrified by the banality of seeing nature as nothing more than a mirror and a meme. Written and self-recorded on her new home on an island off Oslo only accessible by boat, Oh My God comes from a physical place of detachment, but puts a more organic spin on Wilkins’ usual lyrical Verfremdungseffekt. No longer does she leave lacerating lines suspended in mid-air, like a knife dangling off the edge of a table; her observations about contemporary states of distraction and detachment come wreathed in compassion and close focus.

Without in any way lecturing about getting back to the land, there is the sense here that, somewhere along the line, humankind’s priorities have gone askew. No matter: They might yet be gently danced back onto the right track. In sublime standout “The Groke,” Wilkins coins her own myth of a stalking, wintry menace who’s either a sort of SAD selkie or the personification of the climate crisis—you decide—and writes her a theme tune: Miles-funky woodwind and woodblocks, strings with cartoonishly sharp verve, a chorus line intoning the hellhound’s name with a camp severity that implies you’d better watch your back. (While it doesn’t sound like U.S. Girls’ “4 American Dollars,” it nails the throwback brief just as expertly.)

From the same school of finely turned disco wiggles as Arthur Russell’s poppiest moments, “Check Your Face” romances common sense—Wilkins urging it to “season me in reasoning,” and coming on so strong that there’s a good chance this would-be seducer doesn’t understand the equanimous object of her affections at all. It speaks subtly and incisively to how concepts like common sense, boundaries, and bandwidths have become buzzwords, but also sees the delusion of trying to conclusively attain them as endearing, as the coolest of basslines contrasts Wilkins’ exaggerated purr. The dreamier “Oh Minutiae” comes at the devotional affect from a different angle, a waltzing torch song played on what sounds like a cheap keyboard about the tiny rewards to be found in the world around you: the seaweed, “funny-looking oak leaves,” the “snowflakes and cornflakes” of a Norwegian winter. “They say the devil lies in the details,” Wilkins sings, coining another lovely, wonky aphorism: “I think that’s just a phrase … Not all good things are named after saints.”

These funny, weird, tender songs are cast in a softer light than Wilkins’ previous albums, not least the unsettling SAP. Some may lament the lack of eeriness on Oh My God, but her adept songcraft, enveloping melodies, and mood-conjuring is sure-footed and enchanting—recalling Marry Me-era St. Vincent and the uncanniness of latter-day Cate Le Bon—and not short on off-kilter detail. Opener “The Wannabe” is straightforwardly rapturous, bluesy neo-soul that never lapses into pastiche because the sensuality Wilkins is craving is not rote carnality but that of basic human feeling: “I’m not a sculpture,” she sings. “I’ll take the frustrations/Just let me back into my body again.” “Help, I’ve Been Put Into Context!” laments the pinned-butterfly indignation of being incorrectly perceived with wry humor—“Stuck up on my hind legs/Speak in languages I never knew”—and tactile, rehumanizing beauty: chimes like tapped jars, snippets of soul drum fills, gently climbing acoustic chords.

The fragility of all this is underpinned by the potential destruction lingering around the edges. “My Berenice,” a tale of obsession and breakup, is suspiciously pure and loving until the end flares with hysteria: “They say you dig your own grave,” sings Wilkins, building to a fit of pique, “but I dug hers too.” A cover of Shirley Collins’ 1960 song “Space Girl” (subtitled “(Shirley’s)”) is a prescient tale of a girl acting against her own interests, told through her mother’s warning against the dangerous lure of space technology; it winds up with Wilkins shrieking in a pained voice against sharp, bullheaded guitar. “And I Have a Blessed Life” is an insistent incantation of gratitude that clings on amid invocations of dread and seismic bass. “Life is Nietzsche on the beach/And then you die,” Wilkins sings in an ecstatic conclusion.

The German philosopher once stated that how a man builds a sandcastle reveals his relationship to time: one panics; one refuses because of the inevitability of the coming waves; the wise man rolls up his sleeves and embraces the joy of building. The rock will always roll back down the mountain. But building as if the sand were stone—and laying some indelible bass lines in the process—are as good as a foundation gets.