There’s no reason to rush Kim Deal. A proper cool kid icon since her days as the most visibly self-assured member of Pixies, Deal has the enviable demeanor of someone who gets there when she gets there. And if it takes her a couple smoke breaks longer than others might expect, that’s a them problem and not a Kim problem.

It has been almost forty years since Deal joined Pixies and only a few years less since she formed the Breeders. Across those decades, there have been multiple times when it presumably would have made sense to pivot to a solo career: after leaving Pixies, during the different times that the Breeders were on hiatus, after the shockingly popular Pixies reunion that she briefly participated in raised her already impressive profile that much further. Even as there were solo singles and tracks here and there, no full-length album under her own name arrived before now.

Fittingly, Deal’s first solo album, Nobody Loves You More, sounds just like her and yet very little like the bands where she made her alternative fame. There is little of the bristling sounds associated with much of her previous work. Sure, there’s a faint industrial buzz to “Crystal Breath” and a steady thrum that adds an undercurrent of menace to “A Good Time Pushed” (“Part of me wants to/ Push you off of this world/ I’m dull and you’re doomed”). Even those tracks are notable for their gripping understatement rather than the rapidly dwindling firecracker fuse that would be expected from Deal.

Part of Deal’s relevant restraint might be chalked up to recent life experiences that would make anyone somber. In particular, Deal spent more than a decade caring for a parent afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Those duties directly inspired one of the album’s best songs, the delicate “Are You Mine.” Against spare, lovely music stirred gently by the sounds of a pedal steel guitar, Deal transforms one of her mother’s confused questions into the sort of refrain that crops up on any number of love songs: “Are you mine/ Are you my baby.” The luxuriant, orchestrally enhanced title track that opens the album is similarly heavy with emotional potency that seems to flow directly from Deal’s time living with her parent’s confusion: “I don’t know where I am/ And I don’t care/ I just stop at the sight of you/ Standing there.”

The tender care Deal brings to the material here doesn’t mean the album is full of overly precious songs. In addition to some of the more disruptive elements already mentioned, “Disobedience” is jagged and complex, like Lou Reed’s solo work in the nineteen-seventies, and “Big Ben Beat” is as tunefully gnarled as a fIREHOSE classic. As entrancing as Nobody Loves You More can be, it’s never soothing. It is predictable only in its flinty unpredictability. That quality, too, marks it as the perfect way for Deal to step out on her own.