What if attraction were a practice? What if feeling drawn to somebody or something wasn’t an experience that overtook you from the outside, but a skill you could develop and deepen within yourself? Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s new album Gush throws these questions up for grabs. While the Los Angeles-based synthesist has long bent electricity into sound meant to course through and energize the body—she’s made music explicitly intended for meditation and yoga practices, and several of her albums have offered sound as a tool for self-healing—she hasn’t, until now, lingered long in compositions that might inspire a body to spring up and dance. Gush is her most social, libidinal, and active collection of songs to date, mixing her cerebral synthesis with beats inflected by two-step, dancehall, and ballroom. She’s broken out of her head into the sweat of the throng.

A longtime yoga practitioner, contortionist, and acrobat, Smith also started taking vogueing lessons and attending balls while composing Gush. The collective narrativizing of ballroom—the way dancers can embody the social meaning of a given song—inspired her to think through the tension of feeling like a subject while being perceived as an object. “It was really helping me untangle my own identity as a queer, female bodied person, and feelings about objectification,” she said in a recent interview. “The vogue scene helped me get to a place where no matter what things get pushed or projected onto me, when people decide something about me, it no longer has the power to affect me.” She started making songs from a vivid sense of presence that flowed easily into the world around her, lighting up the valves where her interior ended and the exterior began.

Gush also, in part, attempts to transmit the specific experience of Smith’s synesthesia: a neurological phenomenon where senses blend. While plenty of musicians have spoken about audiovisual synesthesia, where sound isn’t just heard but also seen, Smith has a more distinctive variant of the condition. For her, sound becomes physical urge, a series of “distinct, visceral feelings,” she has said. Even speech can impart a similar sensation for her: “Someone could say a word and it’ll create this whole feeling in me, like a bouncy ball just fell out of their mouth, and I have to go catch it.” Sound is not just sound: It’s rubberized, kinetic, irresistible momentum, an impulse that snaps across the nerves.

If Smith’s earlier albums tended to flush the sound field with twirling synthesized figures like so many kites in the sky, Gush turns up the gravity and clears out more negative space. Each sound bears more weight and locks more readily into prolonged grooves. On “Feel Heard,” a cresting treble loop sinks beneath adrenalized polyrhythms and looped vocal snippets, while tracks like “Urges” and “Both” build themselves up patiently as Smith folds her filtered voice into clattering and combusting beats. Most of her discography bends toward euphoria, but here, the bliss pours from the bones, not the brain. You don’t have to think about what’s happening before you melt into the flow.