Dan Bejar has spent so long refining the recipe for his Destroyer persona —three parts acerbic to two parts rueful, a dash of bitters and shake—that it can be easy to overlook just how much experimentation he’s managed without breaking his dry-old-buzzard pose for even a second. Depending on his wayward interests, you might hear his dry baritone wafting over Mick Ronson power chords, Nelson Riddle strings, or Roxy Music fretless bass and saxophone. On “June,” the third single from his upcoming Labyrinthitis, we once again discover something entirely new in the Bejarverse. After four minutes of louche, silky pop in the Kaputt mode, the bass begins vamping on a single note and we get a two-minute spoken-word performance.

It’s a big risk—he could’ve very easily looked like an idiot. But rangy spoken-word, it turns out, perfectly fits this born rambler. The verse is an embarrassment of riches: “You come out swinging, but you go down swinging, too/You pay good money for a million-dollar view.” Near the end, his voice begins to warp and distend, another first for a Destroyer song, but the character meeting our eye is instantly recognizable. “The rude empiricism of every troubled loser, quote-unquote-unquote,” he mutters, and the promise embedded in the song is the same as always: If you could just pinpoint where the quote begins and the unquote ends, you might decipher, finally, what Bejar has been trying to tell you all along.