Arriving fully formed with her debut EP, the bedroom pop artisan Keeper E. turns her classical music background into something that’s equal parts old-soul wisdom and contemporary performance: It searches. It questions. It laments. It hopes.

Born Adelle Elwood in Nova Scotia, she picked up the violin at three, and sat at the piano for the first time the following year. It was in the middle of her classical piano performance degree, at Mount Allison University in the tiny marsh-side arts haven of Sackville, New Brunswick, that she began composing diary-like folk songs about life and love. In school she practiced Bach, Debussy, and Bartok, and in her leisure time she sketched out her own melodies on acoustic guitar.

Once she began recording the album’s seven songs—which are self-produced with the skill and confidence of a veteran engineer—her sound began to change, layering synths, beats, and effects with her clean and sincere voice at the centre. If you combined the bare honesty of Mitski, the adventurous production of Vampire Weekend, and the vibe of Sylvan Esso, you’d get something close to Keeper E.

The lead single, “Please Don’t Tell Me,” begins with a quiet drone and gentle beat before a darker, more insistent synth arrives on the chorus: “You are so distracting,” she laments to an unnamed love. “It’s about the very first stages of falling in love with someone,” she says, “and all the really good feelings that come with that and all the overwhelming feelings that come after that.”

It’s a perfect introduction to Keeper E., a distillation of the album’s many moods in four minutes—the song hops between wide-eyed optimism on the verses to thoughtful concern on the choruses, threading in snaps and oohs as the lyrics oscillate from delirium to fear. “I think that I’m the most serious woman to call herself a silly girl,” she sings, in amongst lines about climate change, capitalism, and love, so much love. Paired with natural imagery—sparrows, flowers, leaves, rivers—that evokes her home on the east coast of Canada, Elwood offers down-to-earth honesty and big, philosophical ideas in equal measure.