Destroyer’s latest album, LABYRINTHITIS, brims with mystic and intoxicating terrain, the threads of Dan Bejar’s notes woven through by a trove of allusions at once eerily familiar and intimately perplexing. The record circuitously draws ever inward, each turn offering giddy surprise, anxious esoterica, and thumping emotionality at equal odds. “Do you remember the mythic beast?” Bejar asks at the outset of “Tintoretto, It’s for You,” the album’s first single, casting torchlight over the labyrinth’s corridors. “Tintoretto, it’s for you/ The ceiling’s on fire and the contract is binding.” Delivered in a Marlene Dietrich smolder, Bejar’s lyrical menace seeps like smoke through the brazen march’s woozy synths and dizzied guitar. “There’s some character here that feels new to me, a low drawl, an evening gown draped over a piano,” Bejar says of the song. Throughout, LABYRINTHITIS insists that everything’s not all right, but that even isolation and dissolution can be a source of joy— stepping into the sunlight at the other end of the maze in your ear, Bejar strolling alongside like a wild-maned, leisure- suited minotaur.

One of this country’s most enigmatic and cherished songwriters, Dan Bejar, takes the stage for a solo performance. Known for his critically acclaimed work with Destroyer and as a founding member of the New Pornographers, Bejar’s career spans over two decades of boundary-pushing music. From the labyrinthine lyrics of Streethawk: A Seduction, to the adventurous sounds of Kaputt along with his contributions to the power-pop of the New Pornographers, Bejar continues to influence entire generations of musicians and music lovers across the world.