Skulls Example is Dear Nora’s first new album in 12 years, and it feels like the project has been gone for a long time but also not very long at all. It feels long in the sense that a lot has changed in the last decade, and also in that it takes a while to come up with songs as good as the ones on Skulls Example. But it’s not so long in that it sounds like Katy Davidson hasn’t skipped a beat since putting out There Is No Home back in 2006, and Skulls Example finds them refreshed and maybe even better than ever.

It’s an album that confronts the advances we’ve made as of late and the ways in which some things are eternal, like the inexorable pull of love and friendship or the desolation and escape that much of the world provides, for as long as we’re all still here. “Check out the people just trying to make it,” Davidson sings on the last line of the album, capturing both the struggle of the day-to-day and how that struggle looks like just a pinprick in the span of history. But that doesn’t make the daily grind any less significant, and Skulls Example has a way of rendering life as beautifully mundane.

We’ve heard a handful of songs from Skulls Example in advance of its release — “Sunset On Humanity,” “White Fur” and “Simulation Feels” — and we talked to Davidson about what it’s like to come back after so long.

You can hear the full album below.

Skulls Example is out 5/25 via Orindal Records. Pre-order it here.