Years ago, Luke Alvine was part of the Brooklyn synth-pop group Pajama People. More recently, he’s been working on a solo project. It’s called Heady Doze, and the music he makes under that name is as druggy and immersive as the moniker would suggest. Today, he’s released his debut album, Free Spirit For Sale.

Alvine wrote, performed, and recorded the whole thing himself. And while the project extends back before 2020 put us all inside our homes for large chunks of time, Free Spirit For Sale does feel like the kind of music born from isolation. Alvine’s process was insular, holed up in his bedroom in Ridgewood, Queens. The result features his voice hushed amongst aqueous synths and hazy atmospherics, the stuff of nocturnal ventures into the deeper and stranger places our minds can go. Alvine described the album as being about “obsessive day-dreaming and trying to live in a memory.” Accordingly, the album has a smeared watercolor aesthetic, the sound of someone wading through the ether to pinpoint the fragments of lost recollections.

Throughout, Heady Doze can toe the line between tongue-in-cheek stonerisms and moments of actual transcendence, like on the highlight “Hotboxing In Heaven.” That’s a funny title, but it’s also a song that rises up from murky, meditative verses into a gorgeous, distant sigh of a chorus. Elsewhere, the bleary sounds of “Blacklight Sun” or “Namechanger” might suggest a heavier mood, but Free Spirit For Sale ultimately maintains a psychedelic sense of beauty. It begins rough and homemade, and blossoms out as far as Alvine’s own thoughts roam. Check it out below.