Lorely Rodriguez, the artist known as Empress Of, has spent the better part of a decade being restless and inventive, which is a polite way of saying she keeps changing her sound before anyone can get comfortable. Since the early 2010s she's slipped from raucous pop to silkier sounds, explored her Honduran-American heritage, and on her last album turned the awards-season phrase "for your consideration" into a full-frontal club-pop meditation on uneven relationships. Her gorgeous fifth album makes a feature of this searching nature.

Written after her family home burned down in the 2025 California wildfires, Dream House is about the rebuilding of that home. Birdsong-dappled field recordings of its construction keep popping up, because nothing says "trauma processing" like ambient audio of contractors hammering drywall. But the album also contemplates what it means to feel at home in yourself and with others, which is the kind of thing you only really think about after the first kind of home is gone.

For all the violent loss behind the record, it sounds amazingly airy, free and open-hearted. The directness of For Your Consideration softens to a humid atmosphere that's bright with hope, Rodriguez's undulating synth lines bubbling with impatience and ecstasy as they cushion her soaring arrow of a voice.

The bangers leap above the fray. SYW, featuring Cecile Believe, elegantly twists EDM to evoke an uncontainable desire. The equally yearning HandsOn sparks with glassy chimes and battering percussion. I Pray 4 U evokes the frisky joy of Jayda G, and Machete, dwelling on defiant post-breakup rebirth, slices like a laser through the night sky.

So: tragedy, rebirth, synthesizers, and a title that sounds like a Zillow listing for a house that no longer exists. The album is out now on Major Arcana/Giant Music. Sometimes the only way to rebuild is to make something that won't burn.