Toxic lakes, wellness clinics and mud-caked bodies: the cardinal direction of Ensign Broderick's newest album, BloodCrush is a saline fever dream, calibrated to the cultish wraith waste vibes of California's Imperial Valley. Inspired by pilgrimage, anti-war protests, Decca-era Stones and Smetana, BloodCrush is the first new collection from an artist who announced himself earlier in 2018 with four archival albums of wildly ambitious, hyper-referential art pop, a fraction of his forty years' of recordings. The album is an unprecedented reflection on creative expression across a lifetime. Produced by Malcolm Burn (Emmylou Harris, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop), recorded in between three other new albums on the way, BloodCrush is as spontaneous an album as an artist who painstakingly analyses and cross-references every letter and note can make. This meticulousness is not a quirk, but a fully realized, highly attuned artistic mandate.