For music that is so unashamedly beautiful, there is something distinctly unnerving about The Meaning of Flowers, the fifth studio album from Danish singer-songwriter, instrumentalist, and producer Agnes Obel. The record, Obel’s first since 2020’s Myopia, reflects her experience of pregnancy and motherhood, with influences including Hannah Arendt, Danish pop music from the 1980s, and the soundtrack to Don’t Look Down.

So far, so human. But The Meaning of Flowers wraps a deep humanity in feelings that are simultaneously otherworldly and profoundly earthy. Like the work of Enya, Clannad, or even Deep Forest, The Meaning of Flowers feels older than time, like music that has been excavated from a cave, or perhaps beamed from the stars. Central to this is Obel’s voice, which has a thick, almost smudged beauty that sits intriguingly between childlike innocence, aged wisdom, and the motherly hum of a warm synthesiser tone. Some of her vocals have been pitch-shifted, but it says a lot of their velvety, viscous quality that it is hard to distinguish between voice and effect. The massed backing vocals on “Laymelli” dissolve into the song’s synthesised string rush like a lazy river meeting the sea.

Similar to Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, the meaning of the words in Obel’s music is sacrificed to tone, creating a kind of primordial superfeeling that goes beyond language. Obel is singing in English—and the lyrics are poetic, when you decipher them—but most of the time you would struggle to recognize their origin, with only the rare phrase raising its head from the soup. Shorn of language, much of the music’s emotional impact relies on the vocal melodies. And they are frequently exquisite—see, for example, the casual turns and pointillist touches on “Laymelli,” the birdlike swoops and exhausted melancholy on the gorgeous “Gemini,” or the early morning film noir of the mysterious “Jenn’s on the Way,” a song whose faintly panicky air suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that Jenn may have nefarious intentions.

Beneath this, the music lays the perfect bed. The Meaning of Flowers, which is notably more electronic than Myopia, was recorded in Obel’s home studio in Berlin, with the producer contributing voice, piano, synth, and samples and guest musicians chipping in. Soft synth textures and sampled harps are very much to the fore—think Enya in her ’80s pomp or Kate Bush at her most electronic—as pianos peak through their fingers and percussion is suggested rather than forced. (Album closer “Faustian Deal” is the only one with real percussive drive, thanks to Julian Sartorius’ commanding jazz swing.)

Guest contributions include lap steel, saxophone, violin, and harmonium, but these are typically subtle touches on a record where voice dominates: the thin fingers of violin that scrape across the canvas of “Blood So Red,” or the sylvan traces of flute on “Deem Me Now.” The result is a very elegant musical mix that remains inconspicuous, as if afraid to raise its hand. It is no coincidence that “Tangerine,” the only purely instrumental track, is also the most underwhelming, a charming chord sequence calling out for vocal relief.

This discretion is a mark of The Meaning of Flowers. Clearly a huge amount of thought went into the record—Obel has supplied a reading list of the books and poetry that she consumed for inspiration—but the Danish artist never forces the point. The album’s intellectual backing operates on a subconscious level, hiding behind a gorgeous abstraction of half-heard lyrics and the lightest of musical touches. To the conscious mind that grasps for meaning, this inscrutability can be unsettling, suggesting a half-remembered nightmare or some ancient, unnameable fear.

The Meaning of Flowers is considerably more tense than might be expected of music so melodically rich and rhythmically placid, like a chillout record for the terminally nervous. But these apparent contradictions make for a significantly more absorbing record, one with lasting appeal, as Obel proves that a little mystery can go a long way.