On Stef Chura’s first two albums, the Detroit singer-songwriter expressed disappointments with subtle tricks of her voice: a little flip, a pointed hiccup, or a strung-out note. “Leadweight,” which kicks off Dancing Alone on the Concrete, her first album in seven years, offers a reminder of Chura’s exquisite control over her timbre. The backdrop—a loping drum pattern, guitar chords about as textured as potato chunks in a can of soup—is nothing to write home about. But her voice vacillates with supernatural ease between warm and pissy, as she threatens to go downtown and shake off a bummed-out boyfriend.

Chura’s previous work featured moments of sidesplitting catharsis; think back to the agonizing “Sincerely Yours” from 2019’s Midnight, where swirls of open chords move at a sustained slog uphill as Chura howls. But few songs on Dancing Alone on the Concrete are as purgative. Instead, she approaches the potential suitors and passing lovers in her lyrics with a sense of ambivalence. “The Concrete,” for example, starts as a fingerpicked “Depreston” rewrite before Chura distinguishes her melancholy by underselling it. “He wants to hit rewind to remind you of all the bad things that you’ve done,” she sighs, as if a partner’s controlling behavior is an unavoidable fact of life.

Where Midnight cranked the volume to match Chura’s acute feelings, Dancing Alone on the Concrete just as often rejects the stock presets. There’s “Lovesick,” a stomach-knot-inducing piano ballad, which arrives right after the rollercoaster ride of “Babydoll.” The latter’s chalky bassline made me think of terrible garage bands that had an unbelievable hold on my alt-rock friends in high school, but Chura grabs that familiar genre and elevates “Babydoll” into a surf jaunt in the process. And “Thunder and Lightning” takes the bleep-bloop foundation of “Very Online Guy” and turns it into a playful skewering of a fuckboy. Where Alvvays’ Molly Rankin felt emboldened to laugh, Chura heightens the menace—“I litter your bed with bobby pins”—already present between the buckling synths and her nursery rhymes.

For all these gestures towards unexpected directions, Chura can still nail a wistful, open-hearted hook. Contributions from Peter Buck and Mike Mills aside, “Danny” deserves as many loving comparisons to R.E.M. as possible, especially when Chura begs the song’s titular character not to rush off to New York City. It evokes “Don't Go Back to Rockville,” with its featherlight melody that’ll quietly tear up your heart and its backing vocal (“Daaaaaaaany!”) that doubles as a skyscraping hook.

Dancing Alone on the Concrete’s songs seem guided by the fear that Chura’s loved ones could pick up and leave at a moment’s notice; there’s also something thrilling in the possibility everything might fall apart. It’s especially prevalent in the loose swing of “Heavy Hitter,” which wraps up the album by pairing uneasy language (“I’m coughing up blood”) and aching imagery (“Ain’t it nice to feel that wet cement/It’s underneath your compliment”). But “Heavy Hitter” is the source of a heartbreaking feint: Just beyond Chura’s cucumber-cool delivery is the hope that Prince Charming returns. Nobody is ever really gone, she hints, using her twang as camouflage.