The cover of Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa’s Savage Imagination looks, at first glance, like something a child could have made. Like the album itself, it was a collaboration between Wong and Minekawa. It’s a soft-hued goulash of clay, paint, drawings, and aluminum foil sculpted into alien shapes and textures. When they made it, according to their interview with Time Out Chicago, they started with a wooden board Minekawa had brought back to her apartment to make into a painting. They began working on it together, and soon using only the flat texture of paint felt limiting, so they began molding three-dimensional materials onto the surface. There’s something three-dimensional about the unearthly sonic consistencies in their songs, too. “Pale Tone Wifi,” for example, creates a delicate tension from a wide assortment of melodies and timbres. Their music together sounds like the collage looks: as decisive as it is whimsical, its childlike quality barely concealing a craftsmanship earned through years of experimentation.

The video for “He She See Feel” shows the same diorama shot spinning through a Tumblr-like digital scene of cloudy sky, glitchy light shapes, and rippling text. Paired with the song’s bouncy percussion, handclaps, high-pitched synthesizers, chunky guitar repetitions, and breathy vocals, it has a disorienting effect. The color palette, reminiscent of graphics from the early days of widespread personal computers, is somewhere between pastel and neon. The surfaces of the objects are pixelated but eerily smooth. Digital tricks of negative space highlight the pink make-up on Minekawa’s mouth and eyes as her head floats Hausu-like around the screen. As the song’s diverse textures swirl together and gain momentum, we watch seemingly mundane objects—a piece of cardboard, part of a log, a hunk of foam cushion, a cord, a blanket, a pink sculpture of Ganesh—spin around the frame.

This is the world Wong and Minekawa have created, the mental space they enter when making something together. The sensibility of their music, like that of the images they make, is otherworldly. That’s not to say they aren’t each rooted in their own set of traditions. Wong, once a member of the playful art-rock band Ponytail, has always played guitar with a kind of scrambled joy. He grew up in Tokyo but lived in Baltimore for a decade, where he became entrenched in the same pop-without-borders warehouse scene that produced Dan Deacon. After a couple years of solo work and his first album with Minekawa, Toropical Circle, he recently moved back to Tokyo. His guitar work on Savage Imagination shows a new maturity to his form, which thrives on a tension between softness and angularity.

Minekawa, once a child star, started out in Japan’s J-Pop world in the ‘90s. She eventually became involved in the Shibuya-kei scene, whose mix of electronic music and French and Brazilian pop from the ‘60s won over some American indie rock fans at the time. Wong had one of her albums on heavy rotation in college. Her particular style of vocal sweetness contains not only the Japanese kawaii sensibility (often translated as “cute,” kawaii is not just a word but a cultural concept) but also a bit of Françoise Hardy. Both Minekawa and Wong are steeped in the kraut rock tradition, too, which explains the way many of their songs repeat motifs that build into an ecstatic climax.

Since they were introduced at one of Wong’s shows a few years ago, they’ve been melding their overlapping influences together and refining their process. Where Toropical Circle was soft and impressionistic, Savage Imagination is darker and more jagged. Some of the sounds are still on the twee side, but they’re offset by eeriness. In “Ancient Aluminum Forest,” we hear delicate oohs and ahs contrast with popping fricatives and shivery synthesizers. It speeds up until it becomes a tornado of sound. This song would have been out of place on Toropical Circle, but it fits into the new space they’ve carved out. This space is somewhere beyond pretty. They’ve found the tension in the narrative.

Listening to the “Dimension Dive” section of the album, a three-song medley, I couldn’t help but think of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. In this film in particular, as well as his other work, Wes Anderson occupies a space between cute and sinister; in one moment we see a claymation rainbow seahorse, in another we see people being shot at. Wong and Minekawa work with similar contradictions. The “Dimension Dive” trilogy starts with one of the more ethereal songs on the album, “Aether Curtain,” and then leaps without warning into “Earth Drum,” whose low rumbling takes us deeper beneath the waves. “Deep Sea Dance” rounds out the journey with bubbling synthesizers over chunky guitar lines. Delving into coldness, Wong and Minekawa’s whimsy manages to resist nostalgia and sentimentality. They could have chosen a more cinematic song as a closer for the full album, but they chose “Pastel Ice Date,” which is more muted than dramatic. Skimming the edge of preciousness, they never fall in.

This isn’t to say that cuteness is unimportant to them, or that we should dismiss cuteness as an aesthetic. This is, after all, the year J-Pop mega-star Kyary Pomyu Pomyu teamed up with pre-eminent producer of bizarre pop music SOPHIE. Kyary Pomyu Pomyu, working within the ultra-cutesy J-Pop world, said in a Dazed and Confused interview that she injects her aesthetic with poison, adding skulls and eyeballs to the otherwise pink, puffy, toy-filled universe in the video for “PONPONPON.” This could explain why she was drawn to working with SOPHIE, who, along with his PC Music label-mates, takes pop music and disembowels it, creating songs that are both creepy and exhilarating in their embrace of excess.

Savage Imagination also plays with this aesthetic, combining the adorable with the ominous, but the end result is more subtle. Rather than taking kawaii to its logical extreme, they use it as one of many flavors. Their emotional range is as wide as their intellectual interest in form. Building each song from ingredients unimaginable as a whole before they put them together, they resist being labeled as a single genre. They’re too voracious to settle on one form alone.

Savage Imagination is out now via Thrill Jockey.