My favorite meme as of late is an old one: “Why not both?” If you’re not familiar, it stems from a TV advertisement for taco shells, in which a family argues over whether to buy hard or soft shells (a difficult choice, to be sure). The impasse grows more and more exasperating, until the young daughter utters the eponymous question and saves their meal from ruin: “Why not both?” Cut to her being lifted up into the air by her relieved and jubilant family, a small goddess among mortals.

I don’t really find this meme very funny. It’s more that I find it resonant. As someone who disdains dichotomy, I feel a kinship between myself and this little girl (not to mention our hairstyles are quite similar). “Why not both?” is a question I find myself internally posing when acquaintances recount petty arguments, when I watch debates on televised news, and, especially, when I read music writing and criticism. More and more in this past year I have noticed a strange quarantine between “intelligent” music from “functional” music, between music that exercises the intellect and music that catalyzes the body. I have read far too many narratives that make it sound as if this battle has been as clear cut as the historical tug-of-war between religion and science (and again, may I ask, “why not both?”), and this angle always puzzles me. This has never been the way that I thought about music, nor the way I experienced it. The music I love most has always been the music that hits all levels at once, with a synergy and intensity that unifies and makes the fragmented whole. I think about the nights in high school where I lay deep in the throes of an Animal Collective induced music coma, and I cannot separate my heady fascination with their chaotic noises and spastic rhythms from the smoldering ache of nostalgia that existed simultaneously. It gets to a point where there is no boundary at all between the two, and that is where, in my opinion, music reaches its peak potency.

Peach Winks, the new EP from Birmingham, Alabama producer Holly Waxwing, sounds, at first listen, to be disjointed, a pastiche crumbling in a controlled avalanche. At points it leaves the brain reeling, disoriented, giddy, but not joyful—overwhelmed, the kind of overwhelmed that leaves no room for emotion. At points I found myself searching for something to hold onto, a grounding force. I flashed back to when I used to surf, more specifically, when I used to wipe out, and somersault beneath the waves, completely out of control, my feet searching for sand, and finding nothing except more water and foam. The difference with Peach Winks, though, is that when I searched for my footing, I found it. It only takes a few seconds of active, deliberate listening to realize that there is nothing disjointed about Holly Waxwing’s work at all—it is just densely, intricately, layered. Below all the twitches and spasms lies a bedrock of solid bass grooves, familiar chord changes and melodic phrases. And that’s when the emotion that you thought, in the midst of madness, was missing, reveals itself to have been there all along.

“Why not both?” almost seems too simple a question for Holly Waxwing. I had always thought about that question, in the music I loved, as a simple marriage between two extremes. But this is not exactly what is going on in Peach Winks, though the positive effect it has on me is certainly similar. Peach Winks does not merge extremes so much as mold infinite possibilities into a single composite, so gracefully that they are somehow all still discernible even as they work in perfect harmony. “Why not both?” is a question that Peach Winks would laugh at, one that it would regard as a step in the right direction, but ultimately sophomoric. The four tracks on this release push the question one level further: “Why not all?”

Peach Winks is out now via Cascine. You can buy it here.