An old saying tells us that a camel is just a horse that was designed by committee. Sneaks isn’t a committee—in fact, it’s not even a band, but rather the nom de plume for musician Eva Moolchan—yet you might say that the new Highway Hypnosis is something like a camel. Maybe you can imagine it being assembled by a task force of genre representatives—a punk who demands terseness and brevity, a bubblegum pop confectioner who doles out earworm melodies, a hip-hop producer who insists on making the whole thing out of reconstituted beats, samples, and sound FX. The end result has a clear pedigree but an odd shape; it’s not hard to unspool its DNA, yet rarely does it sound much like any one of its discrete parts.

Moolchan is a DC-based singer, rapper, spoken word artist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose calling card is minimalism—though Highway Hypnosis proves that such things are always relative. The album clocks in at a breezy and appealing 28 minutes, modest by most metrics but more than twice the length of any previous Sneaks album. And though its songs are all assembled from humble components—voice, bass, drum machines, a smattering of samples and keyboard effects—each one feels intellectually robust and generous with imagination. The tight framing is strategic: It brings clarity and focus to Moolchan’s resourcefulness and whimsy, how her songs always abound with invention even as they feel boiled down to their barest essence.

Nowhere is Sneaks’ gift for distillation more evident than on “Holy Cow Never Saw a Girl Like Her,” which uses just Moolchan’s voice and bass to capture the raucous DIY spirit and bruising physicality of punk, condensing it into ripple after ripple of speaker-rattling low end. The song also happens to be the most extreme example of her songwriting economy; she doesn’t craft narratives so much as she conjures feelings, sketches scenes, and offers mantras to roll around in your head, absorbing their possibility and implication through sheer osmosis. You receive Sneaks’ songs in the same way you’d receive a compilation of haiku, a collection of poems by Kay Ryan, or a set of songs by Tierra Whack—as small and precious treasures, both fragmentary and complete. In the case of this song, the only lyrics Moolchan needs are the ones in the song’s title, which take an instant of ambuscading desire and preserve it in amber. It’s bottled experience; it’s stopped time.

Punk is an obvious touchstone for Moolchan’s hardcore thrift, and she returns to it more than once; check the ominous strum and crude drumming on “And We’re Off,” which marinates in minor-key menace. Yet what makes her minimalism appealing is that it never scans as Spartan or austere; she takes spare elements and multiplies them like so many fish and loaves, resulting in songs heavy with atmosphere, deceptively opulent. There’s some real production jujitsu going on, as on the hazy trance of “Saiditzoneza,” a study in dankness that builds tension from a metronome beat, multi-tracked vocals, and thick studio shimmer. And in the album-closing “Hong Kong to Amsterdam,” a jittery slice of EDM, Moolchan orchestrates a symphony of pots-and-pans beats with the same deft touch as Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear. Give credit to Moolchan, but also to co-producers Carlos Hernandez and Tony Selzer, who open up her post-punk simplicity with new colors and textures.

Given her rhythmic propensity and her smart use of space, it’s no surprise that Moolchan gravitates toward hip-hop and dance music, and some of Highway Hypnosis’ most persuasive moments are its formal engagements with the sounds of the club. “The Way it Goes” embodies the original value proposition of hip-hop production, assembling something concrete from isolated moments; it’s all breaks and beats, stitched together with coherence and elasticity. The ethereal wash of “Cinnamon” morphs into a master class in beat dropping, while “A Lil Close” creates dense funk through a cloud of drum loops and the serpentine twist of Moolchan’s bass.

These songs are structurally and mechanically varied, yet they are all winsome in the same way: They highlight an artist who understands her influences well enough to deploy them confidently and judiciously, making a lot with a little while underscoring just how many things a song can do. Indeed, even with their tight framing, the songs of Sneaks all find different ways to tease, riddle, and pull the rug out from under you. You may get so swept along in the tranquilizing groove of the title track—whispered chants over a trap beat—that it takes a few listens to realize that there’s a commercial for the album buried deep in the mix; by then, you’re well on your way down Moolchan’s conceptual rabbit hole. With its rickety beat, church bells, and titular mantra, “Money Don’t Grow on Trees” takes a piece of colloquial advice and turns it into something cryptic and ominous. And “Beliefs” offers the gift of deprogramming: “Remove your beliefs and start again,” Moolchan sings, another one of those mantras that begs for obsessive scrutiny. One interpretation to consider: It’s the unofficial motto for an album that delights in leaving preconceptions at the door. Throughout it, Moolchan takes up genre tropes not as binding dogma, but as building blocks and puzzle pieces—and what she assembles with them is a tiny marvel, boundless with possibility.