I still remember the first time I heard “Airglow Fires.” A year ago I stood in a hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina, getting ready for the day, testing out various earring and outfit combinations. In the midst of my bustling I stopped to press the play button on my SoundCloud stream. I remember the sense of casual interest when I saw that a new Lone track was beginning to play, and I remember nodding in lukewarm approval as the different elements—the jaunty high hats, the jingling ad libs, the reverent synthetic oohs—slowly appeared out of the track’s initial quiet haze. And then, a minute and a half in…

Well, if you have heard it, you know what happens, and if you haven’t, I won’t spoil it for you with too specific of a description. I will only say that sometimes, there are moments in songs that seize you by the proverbial collar and tug you forcefully into the present, moments that dilate the pupils and saturate everything surrounding you with a sudden lucidity, guaranteeing that you will never forget the moment you decided, with ironic nonchalance, to press play in a hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I am sure that this is the kind of effect that most, if not all musicians would like their work to have. But after listening to Reality Testing, I feel as if this effect is particularly important to Lone—and when closely reading this album as a text, I would even venture to say that the exploration of this effect could well be the very central thesis of Reality Testing as a total work (of course, I am probably projecting my own experience here, but then what is close reading, if not that very self-projection onto an external text?).

The most obvious hint, here, may be the title of the album itself. Reality Testing: that is exactly the kind of near-ineffable phenomenon I encountered when listening to “Airglow Fires” in my hotel room. The song knocked straight out of me any complacency with an assumed reality, challenging the notion that before this moment I had been truly and entirely awake to what was going on around me.

Right after the opening track of the album, the aptly-named “First Born Seconds,” in which the overwhelmingly celestial tones conjure memories of the fetus-floating-through-space scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we get a vocal sample in the danceable and punchy “Restless City” that reminds us, again and again: “When I say real I mean real real, like, reality real.” The phrase offers a certain kind of puzzling tautological obstacle, one that at first seems redundant, but then reveals itself to be profound. How often do we unconsciously decide that we are directly experiencing reality, when really we are caught up in mundane questions of the day such as, Do these gold hoops go with my brown boots?

It is an amazing gift that good music gives us, to enchant us with its enticing and necessary temporality in a way that gives us no other option but to be there with it in the very same second that it is occurring. I could not say exactly what it is about the music on Reality Testing that makes this gift so potent. But I can say that on this album, producer Matt Cutler has packaged and wrapped it up in such a way that makes me believe that he understands how precious and how valuable such a parcel really is.

Reality Testing is out now via R&S Records.