Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Lucy enters Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and Dorothy gets whisked away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. Literary theorist Joseph Campbell would define each of those moments as a “call to adventure,” the first step of the hero’s journey that underlies all storytelling. Now we can add one more such odyssey to the list: Marina Herlop follows her muse into the world of Dja Dja.

After two relatively unadorned albums of piano and voice, Herlop made her name with the expansive Pripyat and the daring Nekkuja. For her follow-up to the pair, she wanted to put restrictions on her creative process—an effort, given her seemingly boundless energy, akin to keeping a runaway train on the rails. Herlop meticulously planned Dja Dja as one continuous composition; on a piece of cardboard laid across the floor of her home studio, she mapped out each section according to Campbell’s schema. After the call to adventure, the hero crosses the threshold into the unknown and meets a series of challenges until, with the help of a mentor, they overcome a great trial. Upon success, they return home forever altered. The recording process itself turned into a hero’s journey for Herlop: She labored on it for three years, surmounting the seemingly insurmountable ordeal with the help of her collaborator Adri Goor. The effort paid off: Spilling over Herlop’s self-imposed boundaries, Dja Dja is her most ambitious album yet, at once weirder, wilder, and more thoughtful than her previous work.

Pripyat and Nekkuja were already wide-reaching in their moods and palettes, but here she harnesses an even broader array of sounds and ideas, pulling in chamber ensembles, alien funk, and holodecks full of trilling birds. The playful flutes of album opener “Flor de los Precipios” telegraph a peaceful realm; the only sign that something might be amiss comes with the pensive piano that introduces “Heladas.” The journey proper begins with “As Meigas,” and Herlop clearly revels in the transition from the known into the unknown, dropping us into a world as disorienting as any in fiction. A twinkling melody floats like pixie dust and then the voices come, each more discomfiting than the last: mumbling, babbling, yodeling, chanting in a made-up language. Across six and a half minutes, these voices seem not only to respond to one another but even to make a certain kind of sense. What’s true of the song is true of the album: Herlop is at her strongest when she’s at her strangest, as her pop sensibilities make even the most confounding choices legible.

Dja Dja’s narrative logic follows the same rule, relying more on intuitive musical cues than on lyrics. Neither do its 15 tracks map exactly onto Campbell’s 17-part model or Christopher Vogler’s later 12-part version. So much the better: We can parse the album for correspondences to the hero’s journey, but the music, like a skyscraper shorn of its scaffolding, stands on its own. Take “You’ve Lost Your Muchness,” whose narrative function correlates to the low point of the quest, when our protagonist is defeated and near death: Behind an angelic choir, a violin becomes increasingly, maddeningly dissonant, until it’s replaced by the beautifully melodic acoustic guitar that introduces “Hay Ángeles.” The relief of the transition is palpable, transcending any narrative you could build around it.

Herlop likens Dja Dja to a novel rather than a collection of short stories, and like many first novels, it needed an editor. For Herlop, a self-described maximalist, the pianist and producer Adri Goor was crucial in this role. Following his advice, she cut much of the album and says she wishes she had cut even more. Yet, like a great novel, the most thrilling parts of Dja Dja are in its excesses. Herlop has done things here that she’s never done before, like scoring orchestral brass with no formal training, which gives “Los Dos Lobos” its audacious swagger, or traveling to Bali to record local gamelan orchestras, which she merges with the big, martial beats of “Average Evil.” These moments, in their boldness and risk, dazzle like someone strutting across a highwire.

“Bliss” is the celebration before the homecoming, the moment of triumph before the hero re-enters the ordinary world. The track begins with a brass fanfare that announces their arrival, followed by shouts of “Hey!” and percussion that grows ever more frenzied and joyful. We’re meant to envision our fictional hero newly transformed, and it’s clear that the process has changed Herlop as well. What began as a map laid across her studio floor has yielded a three-dimensional realm full of baffling wonders and fairytale logic—a wildly original vision from pop music’s furthest fringes.