If Lady Lamb has learned anything during her nearly 30 years on planet Earth, it’s that life is often hard—which is why it’s good there’s always music to turn to.

When it gets to be too much, you reach for Sufjan Stevens’s “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”, and its devastating midsong exclamation “Fuck me, I’m falling apart.” Or you remind yourself you’re not alone with the Fiery Furnaces’ “Rub-Alcohol Blues”, and the lines “Peace on earth I cannot find/The only thing I surely own/Is a worried and troubled mind.”

A dedicated fan of both those acts, the singer born Aly Spaltro understands the benefits of embracing art—musical or otherwise—during the dark times. That’s something she does masterfully on her triumphant third and latest full-length, Even in the Tremor, which sets intricate and evocative wordplay to gold-star art-pop arrangements.

“I’m the type of person who fixates on things and kind of gets lost in my thoughts and daydreams,” says Spaltro, speaking on her cellphone from a Salt Lake City tour stop. “I grapple with my fair share of anxiety—nothing too extreme, but anxiety often at a low level where, if I’m focused too much on the future, I start to spin out. In those moments I naturally end up turning to music.”

During the writing of Even in the Tremor, the singer-guitarist channelled her innermost fears, doubts, and nagging worries into something positive, the result being one of the early great records of 2019. Establishing Spaltro as someone who deserves to be sitting at the same lunch table as giants like St. Vincent, Lykke Li, and Sufjan Stevens, the album is thrillingly about taking chances.

When the singer began approaching producers with fully fleshed-out demos, she was told that she needed to rethink her arrangements, probably because the songs tend to veer off in all sorts of unconventional directions. Eventually choosing to work with Erin Tonkon (David Bowie’s Blackstar), Spaltro held tight to her vision, and it’s the little quirks that make the songs so great. Witness the way that “Deep Love” starts out as an acoustic-folk number and dramatically shifts key at the 3:07 mark to sound like something from Sunday-morning church service in Harlem. Or the way “Even in the Tremor” morphs from downbeat, bass-driven chillwave to a guitar-flared, incandescent indie rocker.

As evidenced by that title track’s lines “The future kills the present if I let it/The past will kill the present if I let it,” Spaltro managed the difficult task of coming up with lyrics that are as simple and straightforward as they are meaningful and profound. Work through enough shit in your life, and you’ll eventually come to the realization that the only way to stay sane in this messed-up world is to root yourself firmly in the present.

“I made a conscious choice with this album to scribble down all the moments where I was feeling anxiety,” she says, “but then also to think about where I am in my life right now. I’m going to be 30 this summer, and I’m in a very different place than I was when I was writing songs at 22 years old. So my goal now, when I’m feeling anxiety, is to try and make the choice to pull myself out of it in real time—to remember to be grateful and really think about all the things that matter to me. So the conscious goal was to take that headspace of anxiety and to try and flip it and essentially fix my own problems sonically. I could let lyrics begin nihilistically, or being in fear, and then rewire things into something positive by the end of the song.”

The idea of finding light in the darkness is indeed something that bleeds through on Even in the Tremor. Spaltro covers a lot of ground on the album’s 11 tracks, finding unconditional love amid soaring strings in “Little Flaws”, and turning the lines “I don’t wanna be afraid of myself anymore” into an uplifting mantra in the joyously bass-bombed “Strange Maneuvers”.

At the same time, Spaltro shows that she hasn’t lost the knack for highly detailed storytelling that’s coloured her back catalogue. She’s at her observant best in “Young Disciple”, which deals with her parents going all-in on religion (right down to the kiddie-pool baptism) when she was a child. That song in many ways sets the tone for Even in the Tremor.

To judge by autobiographical lines like “When I was five, my mama told me that one day we’re all gonna die/Of all places, it was in a fast food joint at night/That left me with a bad taste in my mouth and a knack for existential spinning out,” Spaltro went through some shit as a child that would make it easy for her to be eternally pissed at her parents in adulthood. But she’s accepted that the past can’t be changed, and because of that the best way to move forward in life is to accept things. If being able to show empathy, as Spaltro does in “Young Disciple”, becomes part of the deal, all the better.

“Like I say in my song, my parents were the same age then as I am now, so I get it better now,” she says. “It’s about trying to have that empathy for what my parents were going through when they were 30 years old with three small children. They were both from Maine and they were living in the desert in the southwest and trying to make friends and find a community.

“They tried to find that through religion,” she continues. “It was kind of a phase in my parents’ life where they were really just looking for a sense of belonging. In that excitement, they made, for lack of a better word, some minor mistakes, but nobody’s perfect.”

With Even in the Tremor, though, Spaltro has at least come close.

Lady Lamb plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Thursday (May 2).