Call it the hipster version of keeping up with the Joneses; call it a need to feel with the times; call it a futile attempt to regain that excitement I used to feel as a teenager when I heard new music. These days I find myself splitting the new music I hear into two groups: familiar, comfortable music; and wild, “difficult” music. And as the years go by and my mental library of sounds grows ever larger, it’s increasingly important to me to maintain the right balance of “comfortable” to “difficult.” Whereas it was easy to dive headlong into crazy new sounds as a teenager—Crazy electronic glitch-sample techno? Sure! Eardrum-tearing riot grrl? Yes, please!—these days it’s harder to find music that seems genuinely new. This is bad. It means I’m getting old because there’s less unexplored territory now than when I was a teenager; it also means I’m getting old because I’m lazier than I used to be, content to wait for the next release from Favourite Artist A instead of taking a chance on someone I’ve never heard of. The result is I occasionally feel my musical universe shrinking, and I worry: is this the beginning of a trend that will see me listening to late-90s nostalgia radio when I’m 50 and telling my grandkids about that one Sleater-Kinney concert where I met Corin Tucker?

So it’s a bit of a victory when I do happen to find something outside my usual comfort zone. It’s like a cup of water from the Fountain of Youth. And today, that refreshing glass of vitality comes courtesy of one Marnie Stern, a woman with the voice of an eight-year-old and the dexterous fingers of a metal guitarist. One review I read of In Advance of the Broken Arm made comparisons to Sleater-Kinney and Mary Timony, which may predict Stern’s eventual impact on music but certainly not her sound. “Grapefruit”’s opening sounds a bit like Erase Errata, but everything quickly gets tossed into a blender and set to puree. The result is something that sounds vaguely like an atonal pop song, but not really; an everlasting metal guitar solo, but not really; cheerleader rock, but not really; a twenty-foot high tidal wall of Amazonian women storming the beaches of Normandy, the air ringing with their crescendoing battle cry, but not really. Other tracks follow similarly fragmented formulas, with similarly exuberantly noisy results.

I still don’t know exactly what this is, or if I’ll like it. But Marnie Stern has grabbed my attention like no one else so far this year, and that can only be a good thing.