Albums are so often biographical sketches of the emotional terrain traversed by an artist. For Young Magic, the travel analogy is more precise than usual. Since 2010, singer Melati Malay and collaborator Isaac Emmanuel have played up their many global circumnavigations and concomitant influences. Their first record was largely a collection of sounds cobbled together from audio diary entries in Europe, Australia, and Africa. Malay and Emmanuel don't seem to have stopped moving since.

Travel again figures prominently in the creation story of Still Life. Malay lost her father in 2015. She traveled back to her birthplace in Java, Indonesia, and found herself in a rented beach shack with a recorder, trying to make sense of a lineage that was familiar but foreign; a country that was known yet unknown.

She found herself, as she sings in album opener “Valhalla,” “sifting through shattered pieces of an empty room.” 

Perhaps it's strange that an album so readily identified as having its genesis in Indonesia would come straight out the gates nodding to Norse mythology. But the record, like Young Magic at its misty best, is all invocation and inner vision, lyric suggestions and sonic hints. 

Addressing one's own gods and demons figures strongly in leadoff single “Lucien,” as Malay explained to FADER.

Because these songs are often more incantatory than explanatory, they rely on sonic grounding as much as lyrical denotation. There is explicit aural culture-checking: again see “Lucien,” where gamelan is slowly transmuted into cascading pulses of synths and drums.

But, as with anything prayer-like, the message is most effective in its most tender moments, like subtle album standout “Default Memory,” which skitters along like Daybreaker-era Beth Orton: saturated sounds under a wounded but resilient narrator. 

The cumulative effect is that we understand the title Still Life to mean its common denotation: a picture, a snapshot of a period of convalescence in Malay’s journey. But it’s also a reminder that the varied emotional strata expressed in these songs are all, in fact, still life. Despite everything dark and dense, there's a pulse, alive and invigorating.

Still Life is out on Carpark Records on May 13. Young Magic is touring with Yeasayer in May, including May 14 at Irving Plaza. The band will perform a special live set on Soundcheck at 2pm ET on Wednesday, May 11.