If you’ve ever caught yourself awake at 2:45 a.m., deep in a YouTube k-hole, you’ve most likely stumbled upon ASMR videos. There’s something grippingly risqué about them, probably because of the intense behavior these “ASMRtists” display while trying to make your scalp tingle leans closer to kink than “Hey, here’s a weird thing your body does.” Hours of barely-audible whispering, crinkling paper, and other odd noises created by highly attractive young women—it feels like a creepy fetish thing to me, and I remove it from my browser history with a shame-filled click.

So a few days ago, while listening to Joanne Robertson‘s Black Moon Days in my car, a reverbed laptop click punctuates the end of “Wave” and I feel a familiar tingly feeling: the hair on my scalp standing up and shivers along my spine. It’s an unexplainable ASMR trigger, and I make sure to write it down to try to reproduce the feeling later. Black Moon Days, the newest album by psych-folk artist Joanne Robertson, is full of little plosives and clicks like these, artifacts from the surely GarageBand-sourced album and its frustrated, melancholy tone.

Since pairing up with Dean Blunt a few years ago, Robertson’s has been associated with obfuscation and sadness, lending a feminine half to two of Blunt’s dejected break up albums. But on Black Moon Days, there is very little fuckery; very little to be confused about. Its songs are straightforward in the way rushing thoughts are: concise, but jumbled and free-flowing. Her lyrics are just slightly understandable, the crisp reverb sanding off edges of words and mincing syllables like sawdust. Something in the background of “Out” knocks over some objects or ruffles with the blinds. The specifics don’t matter but you’re immediately pulled out of an intimate moment between you and a songwriter.

Her guitar strumming can be unceasing, like on “Wave” where the constant downstrokes are brash against her earth-worn voice. ”Hi-Watt” here supposedly features Dean Blunt, sticking out as the only song backed by percussion. “Grams” has a bit of ’60s psychedelia to its rambling fingerpicking and foreign melodies. “We sit upon a wooden table” she sings in “Halls,” “You read from a book / You steal all the words.” Observations are slight here, tracks flow together, and beyond “Hi-Watt” you’re presented with about 40 minutes of impactful folk music until the album’s closer: “Bricklin.” It’s a shocklingly loud (seriously, turn your volume down) noise track more akin to Lightning Bolt or Hollinndagain-era Animal Collective than any of the countless contemporary songwriters you’d previously considered comparing her to. It’s aggressive and confrontational, a slight against anyone who attempts to use Black Moon Days as a sleeping aid.

I couldn’t reproduce the ASMR trigger on “Wave” last night while listening to the album in bed. Maybe because I focused so hard, my brain was prepared for it. Much like those YouTube videos, maintaining focus on the artist can be a task with so many distractions. Black Moon Days is presented as surly avant-folk, corrupted by outside influence via lo-fi recording quirks, jarring Dean Blunt appearances, and an unexpected closer. Watch any given ASMR video and you’re bound to let your eyes drift to the out-of-focus background elements cluttering these people’s bedrooms. It humanizes these avatars beyond their surreal video personae. Black Moon Days, when given time, opens itself up similarly.

Black Moon Days is out now via Feeding Tube Records.