Beck doesn’t stay in one place for long. You’ve got his early punk days, his Gen X slacker irony, his off-the-wall hip-hop, his KROQ pandering, his Latin-infused funk-tronica. He can and will do it all; he’s the type of artist who can make the music for Scott Pilgrim’s Sex Bob-omb, then release a sheet music-exclusive album, then co-headline a show with Willie Nelson. His last record, 2019’s Pharrell Williams-produced Hyperspace, leaned heavily into Beck’s pop proclivities, adorned with neon synths and tropicalia production. But it’s been twelve years since the Los Angeles polymath’s last folk outing, Morning Phase, the album that took home the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy in a veritable upset. Morning Phase was billed as a spiritual successor to 2002’s Sea Change, a divorce album fashioned from a lush palette of acoustic instruments, gauzy background vocals, and country and folk embellishments. After the straightforward pop of Colors and Hyperspace, Beck has returned, naturally, to the autumnal warmth of his folk duology. Ride Lonesome marks a new entry in this vein, and he’s reconvened with the same personnel that performed alongside him on Sea Change and Morning Phase: Justin Meldal-Johnsen on bass, Joey Waronker on drums, Jason Falkner and Smokey Hormel on guitar, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. on keys, Nigel Godrich on mixing boards. The new addition to Beck’s folk catalog plays like a check-in among its musicians, seeing what more they can find in this style that they didn’t unearth on their last outing together. Much of it follows the expected course, coasting along on the winds Beck and his band rode before on this record’s older siblings. Occasionally, though, those gusts lift them to a higher plane, hitting a sweet spot between intimate rootsiness and cinematic splendor. “Slow Canyon” treads familiar territory at first, the textural, metallic sheen of the guitar strings as essential as the notes they produce. Subtle slide guitar brushes against it, and gradually, Beck introduces performer after performer until the Calder Quartet and a bed of woodwinds cushion him like a feathery pillow, suffusing everything with resplendence without coming across as overwrought. Those woodwinds resurface on “Falling Through My Hands,” bolstered by barely audible organ, synthesizer, and harmonica, which Beck performs himself. Closing track “Beyond the Light” has all the bells and whistles, the strings and horns, and it’s a stunning finale that highlights how gorgeous the band sounds against an orchestral backdrop. On “For Your Love,” his core group exits the stage, save for the Calder Quartet and various string and horn players, and Beck’s voice sounds majestic in this makeshift concert-hall setting. The pace falters slightly when those symphonic flourishes are absent entirely, mostly because it sounds a tad stagnant, like ground that’s already been well-trodden. Still, everything sounds pretty, such as Stephanie Bennett’s gossamer harp on “Run Away” and Greg Leisz’s plaintive pedal steel on “If You Don’t Know What Love Is.” Like Sea Change, romantic strife finds outlets on Ride Lonesome through oceanic tides, dying flowers, and other natural phenomena, mirroring the largely organic instrumentation underneath. These entreaties and grievances occasionally lose their effect, largely for the same reason that the songs sometimes sound like Beck trying to make an album that sounds a lot like Sea Change. “In the Night” contains both poetic turns of phrase (“Your teachers and your saints / They’ll walk you to the grave / And say you’ll find your way”) and stale analogies (“Darkness came on by / Stories of the sky / To bury all the lies”). But the former, fortunately, shows itself far more often than the latter. On “Disappearing Act,” for instance, he mistakes a stray sound from an adjacent room for his lover, only to remember shortly after that they’re no longer there. The title track, meanwhile, opens with an evocation of paper roses that “forgot to bloom,” signaling a relationship doomed from the start. Hearing Beck in this mode, rather than, say, nonsensical raps about jiu jitsu and Shih Tzus, is compelling, especially when you consider that his breakout song positioned him as a monkey in a time of chimpanzees while getting crazy with the cheese whiz. In an interview with NPR from earlier this year, he reflected on the fruits of a more sincere approach to simplicity in his music. “Sometimes [my music] is just a little too clever,” he said. “I think the ultimate is just writing something simple and universal that doesn’t take a lot of trying to decipher. Simplicity is the ultimate.” Ride Lonesome may not differentiate itself much from what Beck has done before, but when it soars, it’s transcendent. He makes it sound so simple. [Capitol] Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.