Toxe told Vogue that she fancies herself a seafaring pirate—a gimmick that might sound ridiculous if it weren’t so apt for the current state of her career. The Swedish musician has been a relentless explorer for a decade. She’s sailed across intense Slipknot club edits and intimate film soundtracks to arrive at the fiery rhythms of her club-ready 2024 album Toxe2. She’s an enigmatic vocalist and a skilled producer—a one-woman crew on an unsinkable ship that’s still searching for her destination.

On Bubble Treasure, her first album fully in English, Toxe leaves club convention in her wake, collecting a variety of sparse pop arrangements and synth instrumentals that depart from her prior dance-centric work. Glistening chimes, delicate digital keys, and echoing pianos float across a newfound oceanic expanse, beautifully underscoring poignant lyrics shouted softly in her radiant voice. It’s a fully realized quest of discovery—a complete project in its own right and a glimpse of a possible future for her.

Toxe might carry the artistic spirit of a pirate, but she writes and sings like a Siren. Bubble Treasure hypnotically weaves threads of lust and enchantment into its palette of aquatic sounds. Her sheer amazement in the face of life’s simple wonders takes the shape of a brief poem on “In Awe” (“In awe, in awe, I trawl the sky, the edge and beyond/So far, so far/My ordinary heart is full”). Combined with the snail-paced chimes and deep brass, it sounds like it was written on a rock far out at sea—perhaps the same rock where she calls out to lovers passing by on “Lean On My Love,” a track that only needs the mesmerizing repetition of its title to convey her pelagic yearning. She’s still in the role even on the album’s instrumental cuts: The graceful coos and passionate wails of “Boo” and “Elegant & Dead” communicate the same allures without words.

Bubble Treasure’s songwriting feels almost intentionally antithetical to Toxe’s club-centric past. The Siren she is, she spends most of the album luring us in and teasing us with a drop that never comes. The title track follows the sparse opener with what should shape up to be a dramatic banger—its heavy lead synths almost resemble witch house—but the payoff never hits; those synths just trudge on and on as her mesmeric vocals rain down (“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care/Waterfall, waterfall”). Over soft keys, “Wishing Well” adds new pieces measure by measure before a piano refrain washes everything else away; instead of the elements rushing back in as we might expect, the song just drifts away as calm sets in.

Sunk deep in this sea of subversion is “Cranberry Glass,” a track that—in the process of actually completing its crescendo—rewards us with the euphoric payoff we’ve been gracefully swimming around all this time. The album’s usually gentle chimes are tensely arranged here, and Toxe’s vocals oscillate between unusual lows and her chilling falsetto. A resolution is finally in sight, and when it hits, a wash of gated synths and warped vocals crashes down like a tidal wave. What might have turned into the album’s most tired offering is actually its rarest treasure, a track that elegantly toes the line between refreshing experimentats and the usual expectations for a progressive electronic track.

Toxe picks only two moments to really swing for the fences. Her ambition absolutely hits on “Cranberry Glass,” but she strikes out on the other big swing, “A Girl Who Needs a Brain”—a track that admirably attempts to combine mermaid elegance and zombie ditziness (it even ends with faux cheerleading chant) but ultimately comes off as a distracting outcast to the album’s usually ravishing tales. It’s the one moment here where time is truly wasted; Bubble Treasure is otherwise dedicated to meaningful acts of discovery. By the time we arrive at the ephemeral “Winning” and “Onlything,” the beautiful piano ballads that close the album, we gaze upon a new horizon right alongside her; the little treasures she’s found along the way might just guide us all to the place she’s always been sailing toward.