These flickering alt-pop vignettes are both playful and poignant

George Miller mingles instant earworms and slow-burn ballads on his warm and woozy fourth album as Joji. Only one of these 21 tracks passes the three-minute mark, making them feel like flickering alt-pop vignettes. Yet they’re reliably poignant, with a low-key sense of experimentation also at play. The opening “PIXELATED KISSES” unfolds as sleepy, distorted R&B, only for The Postal Service-esque “Last of a Dying Breed” to ride along on perkier beats and Miller’s soft, chanted vocal delivery. The Japanese-born multihyphenate gracefully weaves breakbeats and falsetto into “Love Me Better”, flirts with head-nodding hip-hop on “Tarmac” and crafts a lush homage to my bloody valentine’s 1991 shoegaze classic loveless on “LOVE YOU LESS”. Elsewhere, murmured pop songs give way to dreamy romantic entreaties. Everything here feels intimate and handcrafted, with the sparse arrangements allowing extra space for Miller’s tender singing to drift along. Even when the piano ballad “Past Won’t Leave My Bed” blossoms into something grander by comparison, it still centres one of his loveliest, most affecting turns at the mic to date.