Chrystabell and David Lynch’s new album Cellophane Memories may be one of the worst albums I’ve ever heard—or the best. Either way, as a work of art, I’m certain it’s some sort of genius. I make the distinction here between an album and art because Cellophane Memories, released last week by Sacred Bones Records, is much more of a cut-up and collaged sound art piece than any recognizable musical album. Without verses or choruses, it’s hard to even label its ten tracks as individual songs. Each floats into one another, only distinguishable by shifts in the ghostly ambient sonic soup—shimmering synths, malevolent hums, twangy drifting guitars, ethereal wooshes.

For her part, Chrystabell has tossed aside her typical torch song belting, as heard on the gorgeous and inexplicably tearjerking “Polish Poem,” which heralds the sublime conclusion of Lynch’s Inland Empire. Instead, she performs a wailful mournful monotone warbling like she’s singing to herself in the shower, sometimes squeaked out in a strained upper register. If that weren’t enough, these vocals have been snipped up and layered discordantly over one another. This has a destabilizing effect as lines collide and repeat, blur and obscure, with only a few clearly delivered, emerging out of this auditory mist to blurt out imagery of, for instance, a dinner of “meat and potatoes” in “You Know The Rest.” At times, her voice comes crashing loudly out of the mix like her proclamation, “The air is ALIVE!” that opens “Dance of Light.” Add to this dissonant choir of Chrystabells the startling appearance of freaky reversed vocals as if she is stuck in the Black Lodge.

If this sounds like a punishing and perplexing listen, it is. Cellophane Memories is deeply bizarre, a bit frightening, and admirably off-putting. For the latter, I’ll admit that when I initially heard the first two singles, “Sublime Eternal Love” and “The Answers to the Questions,” I thought this is fucking awful, turned it off, and moved on. However, on a full album listen, something clicked. Strangely, it took perhaps the most experimental and terrifying of tracks to convince me: “Reflections in a Blade,” which details a nightmare of a prowler’s shining beam of light “dancing like a shiny knife blade” through jagged bursts of warped reversed vocals and the doomed drone of Dean Hurley’s “Night Electricity Theme” from Twin Peaks: The Return. Still, while I appreciated its experimental ambition, I assumed I would never listen to the album again. I mean, it’s not exactly a catchy, summer bop. Wrong. I keep returning, digging deeper into its, as Lynch would say, “mysteries.” I’ve even had “She Knew” stuck in my head for days.

At least I’m not alone with this response. Lynch and Chrystabell too experienced a similar journey with their new music. As Lynch told the LA Times, “The first time we heard it, it sounded terrible.” And Chrystabell affirmed, “The first couple of times you’re like, ‘I don’t know about this. I don’t know about this at all,’…‘Do you want to listen again?’ ‘Yeah, David.’ It’s just twisting your brain a little bit, and then you’re like, ‘Actually, I think this is kind of fantastic.’”

What makes the album so dually challenging and exciting is that Lynch and Chrystabell don’t provide listeners with anything to grasp or hold onto. It’s hard to even come up with a related precedent for the sound of Cellophane Memories. Sure, the music itself may resonate with other spooky ambient artists like Hilary Woods’s Acts of Light, Orchid Mantis’s a field with no edges, or even Warren Ellis’s atmospherics in his collaborative Carnage with Nick Cave. Yet, Chrystabell’s vocal collage is something else entirely. The closest I can come up with is Eartheater’s cover of System of a Down’s “Chop Suey.”

And that’s even before getting into the utter strangeness of the lyrics themselves. Lynch penned the lyrics on the fly (much like the making of Inland Empire), handing them off to Chrystabell to record who would, then, improvise the melodies. This automatic writing and recording process allows the lyrics to be as intangible as the instrumentals. Figures drift in and out of the songs like “She Knew,” “The Sky Falls,” and “With Small Animals.” There are many secrets embedded in these narratives. What is the “it” the narrator saw in “Sublime Eternal Love” that made him fall crying to his knees? What is “that look” Sam had in “You Know The Rest,” which propels the rest of the song? Who is “them” the “you” witnessed walking in “So Much Love”? And the biggest mystery of all: why do all these people suffer from that oh-so-Lynchian conundrum of recognizing people from long ago as in “She Knew” (“She felt she knew him from somewhere before”) or from dreams “Reflections in a Blade” (“She recognized him from a dream she had”)? Of course, there are no answers, only reveling in this nameless, eerie deja-vu. Often set in forests or gardens, the songs reflect something of the album’s mmm…unique inspiration, according to its description:

“The origin of Chrystabell and David Lynch’s album Cellophane Memories comes from a vision that David experienced during a nighttime walk through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light. As he recalls it, the light became the lilt of Chrystabell’s voice and revealed a secret to him.”

So quintessentially David Lynch. As is the album as a whole. Though Cellophane Memories may not have many outside influences, it is, however, quite self-referential—whether Lynch solo or his work with his close collaborators. Much of this relates to the production of the album itself, which included discovering a treasure trove of material in his recording studio left from other projects. Some were from Dean Hurley (hence the appearance of “Night Electricity Theme” in “Reflections in a Blade) and others with the late Angelo Badalamenti whose posthumous appearance here is poignant on its own. Not only do the songs speak to remembering or recognizing someone from before, but, because of these resurrected tapes, the songs pluck on the heartstrings and memories of Lynch fanatics. For instance, Badalamenti’s synths on the wistful “So Much Love” remind me of Laura’s angelic absolution at the end of Fire Walk With Me. Others are not quite so clear but just have the generic aural vibe of Chrystabell trilling over the soundtrack to The Return or Hurley and Lynch’s unnerving exhibition soundscape The Air is On Fire.

With this evocation of memory, achieved through slicing and splicing up both old and new sounds, Cellophane Memories may be the closest Lynch has ever come to musically nailing the same representation of the dream state he is known for on film and TV. From his earlier collaborations with Chrystabell—2011’s This Train and 2016’s Somewhere in the Nowhere—to his own records—Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream, Lynch’s forays into music are many but, largely, quite conventional. At least conventional enough that I can immediately recognize them as songs, even considering the high-pitched vocals and the berserk lyrics of “Crazy Clown Time” that seem as if they were ripped straight from his demented paintings. Even the most extreme, Thought Gang, his abrasive and next-to-unlistenable duo with Badalamenti, can still be placed in conversation with other experimental classical music.

Understood in this context, Cellophane Memories is a thrilling breakthrough for both collaborators (At last, I hope, nobody can accuse Chrystabell of attempting to unseat Julee Cruise). So delicate and ephemeral, an effect Lynch terms “cellophane,” that it risks disintegrating into wispy nonsense. Sure, the album sounds unpolished and unpracticed (because it is), but it’s also urgent and haunting in a way that gets under your skin. And while there is unquestionably a lot of samey-samey here, the album takes listeners through some kind of arc, peaking with the heavenly transcendence of “Sublime Eternal Love.” The song details an almost religious vision of the power of music with the narrator genuflecting, calling out, and receiving grace through music. If this is what Chrystabell and Lynch experienced while making this, I want in!