LAST YEAR Welsh musician Cate Le Bon released her fourth full-length, Crab Day. The asymmetrical guitar pop record is named after an imagined holiday created by Le Bon’s niece, who was incredulous about the purpose of April Fool’s Day and instead decided to spend April 1 celebrating 10-legged crustaceans. Crab Day follows suit: Le Bon toys with the surprising malleability of our reality, bending and twisting its foundations like they’re neon pipe cleaners. She takes the leashes off her sharp guitar riffs and lets them run wild through tall grasses while she searches for shapes in passing clouds and tries to make sense of life’s oddities, like the discovery that for years she’d observed her birthday on the wrong day. Le Bon’s music speaks in the language of absurdity, but reveals itself to be as logical and thoughtfully calculating as nature. This month she’s releasing an EP called Rock Pool, four of her “killed darlings” from Crab Day that exist in the same surreal universe. Despite her fluency in nonsense, here even Le Bon seems overwhelmed by the world’s current state of chaos. On opener “Aside from Growing Old” she sings, “I don’t mind cleaning up the mug museum,” referencing her 2013 album Mug Museum (a name inspired by the flock of used mugs collecting in her bedroom, measures of passing time). But in the song’s chorus Le Bon feverishly searches for order, asking “What’s the hubbub? I’m losing my mind”—a relatable sentiment as we move into an age that seems unnervingly, tragically absurd.