Ada: Blondie

The easy way into Ada's excellent Blondie comes by way of a surprise: After eight preternaturally musical dance tracks, replete with sing-songy vocals and melodic asides, Ada swoops down for a heart-tugging cover of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps." It sets the words—"Wait, they don't love you like I love you, now"—against a down-turned spell of synth-pop. But once the atmospheric mood congeals, when the original's expectancy grows demonstrably sad and unrequitable, a beat builds a rickety but forceful bridge to a place where Karen O's tears smear with beads of sweat from the dance floor.

Ada specializes in that kind of moment. After making a series of beloved singles for Areal, a sultry, bumptious microhouse label in Cologne, Germany, Ada has revealed herself as a producer with an ear for details and dovetails. Her tracks take sharp turns where others cruise along unbothered: After a robot rasps a call to "wet your lips" in the album-opening "Eve," the track dives into a delicate, complex fugue of would-be guitars and harpsichords. "Cool My Fire (I'm Burning)" circles around a simmering microhouse core, with repeated murmurings of the word "desire" gummed atop beats that sound like fireworks set off in a powder room.

Blondie trades in many such moments of privatized rapture. Owing both to Ada's meticulous sound-design and the ways her tracks avoid loopy patterns, the album's biggest dance tracks scale down to stamp personal moments when desire stings and kisses seal the deal. It's a kind of warmth not entirely foreign to Ada's Germanic milieu, but she has a way of making the whole of emotive techno her own to dream up and rub down.