Earlier this month, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat announced a new Dan Deacon-produced album, Riddles, with “Dunce” (which made our best songs of the week list), and today they’re sharing the title track from that album, “Riddles.” It’s a kinetic bubble, with a plinking of keys and a persistent drum beat that weighs down Schrader’s surprisingly dreamy vocals. Here, he’s reflecting on how impossible it is to find answers to life’s hardest questions: “Riddles do me little favor/ The Earth has turned her crystal eyes on me/ Whittled to a child cradled/ Sleep until I slip away.”

Here’s Schrader’s bit on the song:

To me this song is about shaking the ghost of an ever-present teenage self, only to realize you are only ‘that ghost’ and nothing more. You’ve been asleep in your head and you wake to a shattered present which makes that over-romanticized ‘ideal’ past all that more alluring. Even with its monsters, you run back into it and pull the covers over your head.

This was where my head was at the time I got a voicemail that my Step Dad died. He was a larger than life character who I had very mixed and unresolved feelings about. Learning of his death was like waking up and suddenly the mountains were all gone. Gravity shifted, and it kicked up all the dust bunnies of a damaged past along with its rich, dark beauty.

Listen below.

Riddles is out 3/2 via Carpark Records. Pre-order it here.