There are probably very few people left who are more apt to romanticize things they don’t do than yours truly. I spend an inordinate amount of time every day looking at things I either can’t or won’t do for one reason or another: recipes I’ll never cook, places I’ll never travel to, homes I’ll never live in, pets I’ll never adopt. It’s not out of any sort of overbearing other obligation that I don’t try my hardest to experience these things—it’s mostly just a combination of unjust apathy and uncertainty.

My word of the year is liminality. It comes from the Latin word for “a threshold,” and describes the point between states where one has yet to construct a whole identity, feeling, or purpose. Post-college, post-job, and post-everything else, things feel bleak because they are liminal. Lately all I really want to do is sit in a big grove of trees at dusk and nap.

I’ve come around to appreciate these transitional periods more by savoring the more brief ones. Long road trips or walks offer a chance for microscopic metamorphoses. With perfect timing enters Three Love Songs, Maryland musician Sam Ray’s new album under his Ricky Eat Acid moniker. It’s his first record as producer since 2011′s Seeing Little Ghosts Everywhere, and stylistically continues a streak of emotionally affecting, sonically rich compositions ranging from insular ambient drone to colossal orchestral house. Released via Brooklyn imprint Orchid Tapes, the limited LP pressing sold out in just over two days, made all the more impressive by the fact it’s both label and artist’s first ever vinyl release.

Three Love Songs, a humble record, would be almost frustratingly modest if it weren’t so endearing. The first twenty minutes of the album float through variations of ambient white noise, harmonic blips, and warm, organic sounds. In particular, “In rural virginia; watching glowing lights crawl from the dark corners of the room,” which submerges a field recording of a vengeful radio preacher in a bath of lush ambience, is a revelatory piece of music that fashions vivid imagery out of simple elements. Here, in comparison to past works, Ray shoots for specific mental scenery from the ever-shifting songs to their lengthy, descriptive song titles like “Driving alone past roadwork at night.”

Eventually, a bouncing, chopped keyboard melody carves out a rhythm in “It will draw me over to it like it always does,” and out of nowhere a frantic beat erupts. From here on out, the record blooms and flourishes with successively ornate songs including the orchestral house climax of “In my dreams we’re almost touching.” Despite working in traditionally electronic territory, a lot of the instruments and samples here come from unfamiliar sources: toy keyboards, tape players, lyrics sung by friends, all which make even the most club-worthy jams equally as sincere as they are danceable.

In conjunction with Seeing Little Ghosts Everywhere, which originally began as a song diary, Three Love Songs feels in a way more sure of its trajectory and purpose. Where some of the songs on Ray’s last record dealt with death and loss in an abstract (yet still personal) way, projecting them onto video game characters or imaginative scenes, Three Love Songs earnestly aims for real, shared experiences. Whether it be the album’s hallucinatory opening poem or the transcendental highlight “I can hear the heart breaking as one,” everything here is wrestling with brutally raw emotions. That’s not to suggest that anything Ray has done in the past is any less moving, but the way Three Love Songs is sequenced basically radiates confidence.

I worry that my obsession with living somewhere quiet and alone, surrounded by trees, is more of an escape than an actual positive goal. In some twisted way, maybe it’s the low risk and accountability that draws me to such a lifestyle. If you’re eternally in a liminal state, nothing matters and things aren’t as heavy. I think, intentionally or not, Three Love Songs is a sort of antithesis to escapism. There is no sidestepping any issue, and no meekness in addressing intense subject matter. It’s a headfirst swan dive into an uncertain and terrifying evolution, emerging renewed and reassured. I can only hope for such grace in my own future.

Three Love Songs will be out January 21st via Orchid Tapes.