The question always goes: If this were an anonymous artist, would anyone pay attention? Maybe that’s why British model and actress Cara Delevingne’s debut, Not Normal, will stop at nothing to grab a listener. Delevingne has tried out music before—a management contract with American Idol producer Simon Fuller’s company, a bizarre Pharrell collab for her appearance in 2017’s ill-fated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—but this album has little to do with that. After three years of sobriety, Delevingne had an “emotional backup” she wanted to explore, and music became an outlet. Her debut, Not Normal, is a disorienting, overwhelming 38 minutes of music, with chaotic bursts of electronic noise and shattering dynamic shifts. Whatever you think this album sounds like, Delevingne wants to prove you wrong.

She made the record with producer BJ Burton, who worked on Charli xcx’s how i’m feeling now and Bon Iver’s 22, A Million; Not Normal takes after those albums’ love of distortion and unconventional song structures. In fact it sounds like every electropop record from the last decade thrown into a malfunctioning blender; I picture a mood board with Imaginal Disk, Magdalene, and probably a Magic Eye book. Thematically, that restlessness serves a purpose: The way these songs evolve and devolve reflects the blurriness of the lyrics, which evoke the difficulty in sorting love from dependency, comfort from pain. The breakbeat-driven “Out of My Head” has an exhilarating call-and-response chorus where Delevingne tries to snap out of a dissociative episode; when she sings, “Close my eyes and I disappear,” the song suddenly disintegrates, too. On “I Forgot,” every moment of clarity comes with an enormous wave of distortion. When the song turns into a “What Was I Made For?”-esque ballad, Delevingne’s vocals are alarmingly up-close, as if trying to get ahead of an oncoming wave.

The problem is, there’s just so much going on. “Lights Up” and “The Mask” have striking melodies (and, on “Lights Up,” a beautiful piano part from Tommy King), yet can’t develop them, as if fearing they’ll lose interest if they stick on one idea and one volume for too long. Maybe this is intentional given the album’s themes, but the unpredictable starts to feel predictable when every quiet moment sounds like a crescendo is about to erupt. The constant shapeshifting nearly torpedoes a would-be standout like the Fiona Apple co-write “Feel It” (“Fuck me, don’t fix me, excite me with safety”). The mesmerizing side-chained synths and syncopated melodies of the early choruses give way to a diffuse second half, and the song runs out of steam with more than a minute to go.

Delevingne and Burton take lots of risks, and many pay off, but they’ve skipped a few steps on the way to making an experimental opus. The thing about Apple’s music—one of Delevingne’s formative influences—is that however weird she gets, underneath the caustic, cerebral lyrics, there’s a love of old-school Cole Porter and Gershwin songwriting that roots her in that Great American Songbook sensibility. Not Normal is most fun when, on the title track, Delevingne dispenses with the chilly distortion and hams it up like a Disney villain. It’s a weird moment, and yet the clichés about humans just “trying to get by” land because there’s an earnestness the rest of the album is too afraid to embrace. When, on the genuinely soaring “Crazy, Baby,” Delevingne goes, “I’m sorry, this is a love song,” it’s emblematic of a record that’s both achingly vulnerable and never truly lets its guard down.