In a couple weeks, the Bay Area musician Stephen Steinbrink will release a new album, Utopia Teased. He’s shared “Bad Love” and the Jay Som-featuring “Mom” from it already, and today we get to hear a third single, “A Part Of Me Is A Part Of You.” This one sounds syrupy and heavy, bogged down by the ties of an old relationship. It’s a series of taut phrases stretching between the past and the present — “Your good love is my bad dream”; “A heartbeat never even-keeled/ Consistent like a broken wheel” — that sounds better off left separated. Here’s what Steinbrink said about the song to The Fader:

I wrote this song in January of 2017, and since then I’ve grown to think of it as a love song about attachment, and how to let it go. How hard I was resisting change that winter, desperately grasping and contorting myself into impossible positions trying to hold on close to what I wanted. As I collaged the song together, I had these vivid images in my head that are woven into the first two verses: imagining the nightmare of an old lover with their new person, remembered conversations with people who are dead, old joys that were specific to a moment in time that I’ll never experience again. Then, in the third verse, an optimistic reconciliation of that with a new idea that something can remain a part of me after if it’s gone, which calmed the grief and anger. The hope that experiences can bend my DNA and exist forever outside of time.

Listen below.

Utopia Teased is out 11/9 via Western Vinyl/Melodic Records. Pre-order it here.