The new song “Boomer” is reportedly inspired by Bartees Strange’s experience of smoking weed with his father for the first time. (“smoking with your parents is something ever my grown human should experience. Full circle shit,” confirmed Strange, via tweet.) That entertaining detail doesn’t get at the crux of the song’s appeal, which is Strange’s astounding musical creative that reveal boundaries between genres to be useless fictions. There are flavors of exuberant hip hop, propulsive rock, jangling indie, and bendy pop. And then the breakdown in the middle sounds like classic blues conjured into reincarnated life (“You can’t hurt me/ I’ve been bit alive by the devil” are lyrics that could have originated on a plank porch in Mississippi a hundred years ago), like a Christmas Carol ghost coming back to remind everyone that is the undisputed ancestor of them all.

Live Forever, the debut full-length from Strange, is scheduled for release in October 2020.