Caribou’s fifth album, Swim, is the headiest thing Dan Snaith has done in some time. In spite of Andorra’s focus on lush melodies, ’60s pop and arrangements made to accentuate those leanings, across nine new songs he dives into more cerebral territory. He places percussion at the forefront and anchors a world of textures and effects around his drums, yielding what could simultaneously be his most danceable and psychedelic material yet.

That said, Snaith is not shooting to make dance music here; his rhythms rarely give way to straightforward thumps, and when they do, they’re unexpected and violent, like on “Found Out,” where the kick-snare comes in suddenly following the synths that loop throughout much of the song, and then breaks down and gives way to distorted, clattering toms only two minutes later. “Bowls” comes next, and more than anything else, it sounds like arpeggiated harps and bells bouncing violently between the left and right stereo channels before aggressive bass hits, and the arrangement sounds almost like a rewriting of house music tropes, gleefully defiant and ringing out the entire time.

On “Leave House” he channels the late cellist and disco auteur Arthur Russell almost completely, evoking his late-period electronic compositions and processing his vocals through a similar set of effects, rendering it reverbed and ghostlike; sounds float around him.

Yet most of these songs also lack straightforward verse-chorus structures. Not that that’s anything new for Caribou, whose early material was entirely instrumental, but it marks a departure from Andorra’s comparatively tight construction. “Hannibal” reveals both an easily-digestible rhythm and a pop song, but not until four minutes in, and it ends almost immediately after establishing itself. Only two moments provide easy points of entry, and those are opener “Odessa” and closer “Jamelia.” “Odessa” is the only moment across the entire disc in which Snaith places his increasingly-strong singing at the forefront, and it pulls off the IDM/psych-pop/indie-dance crossover thing within the context of the pop song effortlessly without sacrificing texture or interesting production; an entire album of these would, more or less, kill. “Jamelia” opens dissonant and gives way to Snaith’s loudest, most impassioned-sounding vocals yet in a stunning build that, frustratingly, only hits once.

At times, Swim listens like a complete and total assault of ideas. Snaith rarely lets something ride for more than a minute, and when he does, it’s something unexpected, even contrary to the notions of hooks and immediacy. Beyond its bookends, it unravels slowly, and though few moments stand out, taken as a whole it proves as compelling as it is occasionally irritating, much like 2005’s The Milk of Human Kindness: its closest point of reference within his back catalog. It does, however, prove that Snaith is one who refuses to be content with simply rehashing concepts within his palette and is still among the most interesting electronic musicians working now.