Kurt Vile’s 2013 Wakin On A Pretty Daze made more than a few waves, albeit for some of the wrong reasons—namely the media’s insistence on calling it “stoner rock.” Two years later, the mellow gold continues with b’lieve i’m goin down (as does the apocope). This time, though, Vile leaves behind the heavy reverb that gave Daze the haze and builds his songs around barebones piano chords and elliptical acoustic guitar parts that repeat on into infinity. His lyrics have grown more self-conscious and Vile himself may have grown more confused.

Instead of waking up to love in a daze (as he does on Wakin), in the opening lines of “Pretty Pimpin” Vile sings of looking in the bathroom mirror and seeing a man he doesn’t recognize. On “Life Like This,” Vile interrupts himself in order to squeeze in a few extra lyrics. In the videos for both of these songs, there are multiple Kurts onscreen at once. The result is a Vile who’s constantly doing double takes, revising his foggy vision of outward reality as his songs materialize on tape.

The whole album is darker in all dimensions; b’lieve is the night to Wakin’s day. In fact, Vile wrote most of the record at night on his couch while his wife and two children slept, though I much prefer the image of Vile as a “certified badass out for a night on the town,” as he sings on “That’s Life Tho (almost hate to say).”

Vile’s lyrics explain how he and his songs got to this new place. On “Lost my Head there,” he sings: “I was buggin’ out ’bout a couple-two-three things / Picked up my microphone and started to sing / I was feeling worse than the words come out / Fell on some keys, and this song walked outta me.” These are songs about feelings: of solitude, of confusion, of awe, or even of honest incertitude. And rather than trying to do something with these feelings, like distilling them down into coy metaphors as he might have on Wakin, Vile simply lays ‘em on us. Throughout the record, he insists on being a man who rolls with the punches, and the man who, in a year, went from celebrating an official, citywide “Kurt Vile Day” to seeing his Fishtown mural painted over probably knows this best. “The laws of physics have shown that a man must walk through life via peaks and valleys,” he sings on “That’s Life Tho (almost hate to say).” Listening to Vile’s voice, you’ll notice that the cheeky snarls are quite a bit fewer than on past records.

Even amidst the melancholy, b’lieve has an air of humor about it. On the aptly titled “Kidding Around,” Vile pokes at his own metapoetic musings about songwriting: “What’s the meaning of this song / And what’s this piece of wood / I don’t care it sounds so pretty / Its change is so sublime / What was the meaning of that last line?” Of course, this isn’t his first affair with deadpan humor, but at certain moments, the Vile of b’lieve seems to sing in front of an exposed brick wall.

Musically too, b’lieve departs from Wakinand in many ways harkens back to the sounds of Smoke Ring (2011). Gone are the seemingly never-ending guitar solos and thick studio sound, now replaced with hypnotic grooves that build on the simplest of elements before dissipating abruptly with the same offhand ease of Vile’s de-syncopated delivery. Most of the mellower tracks—“Wheelhouse” especially—have a meditative quality. Another novelty is the presence of a purely instrumental track, “Bad Omens.” We haven’t seen this from Vile since the bonus tracks of Childish Prodigy (2009), before anybody really cared about Philadelphia’s chief couch-bound, guitar-wielding slacker philosopher.

B’lieve isn’t just introspective, though—there are too many pop culture references to count, which opens up the windows of an album that might otherwise risk confinement to the sounds of Vile’s living room. Vile reclaims Sam Cooke’s lyrics on “Dust Bunnies,” and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man pays a visit during “That’s Life Tho (almost hate to say).” Vile even quotes himself with the line “believers andlovers” which appeared on Smoke Ring For My Halo’s “Jesus Fever” and later on “Never Run Away” from Wakin. I like to think that this is Vile’s pseudo-poetic way of describing his listeners. And of course, “All in a Daze Work” is an all-too-obvious lexical tie to his 2013 LP. There are references to Flannery O’Connor’s

Wise Blood and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on the banjo-driven “I’m an Outlaw.” Hell, there’s even a Gatsby allusion during the second verse of “That’s Life, tho (almost hate to say).” This is a Vile who’s been reading a lot (and a lot in the Southern Gothic vain, specifically), and who’s allowed the prose to seep into the texture of his music. The lyric referencing Gatsby—“I hang glide into the valley of ashes”—sounds almost punchline-like, but told by Vile, it’s weighed down by a sense of tragedy. Cloaked in Vile’s Fishtown drawl, prose turns subtly to poetry.

Just as diverse as Vile’s literary allusions is the list of studios where these 12 tracks were laid down: the making of b’lieve saw Vile recording in Brooklyn, L.A., Athens, Georgia, and most notably, Joshua Tree’s Rancho de la Luna. “Wheelhouse,” which he recorded at Joshua Tree, seems most like an exercise in spirituality. In an interview with SPIN, Vile recalls staying up to watch the sunrise after recording the song in question, and feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of the “mystical, magical desert” in which he stood. “Wheelhouse” is also Vile’s self-proclaimed best song, and I think he’s right. He sings of finding a temple, basking in its glory, rolling around on its carpet, sleeping soundly, and breathing deeply. And somewhere between the feedback, the weight of the drums, and Vile’s familiar voice is where that temple can be found.

Put simply, B’lieve is music to get mindful to.