After his last album as Gold Panda, Derwin Dicker thought he might be done with the alias. The UK musician had made three full-lengths under that name, sampling thrift-store vinyl into wistful electronica that caught the light like a field of wheat at the golden hour. But after wrapping the third LP, 2016’s Good Luck and Do Your Best, he considered putting his signature palette out to pasture, along with some shopworn formats. “You know, 11-track albums with an arc, that’s over,” he declared.

For the next six years, Gold Panda mostly went dark as Dicker tried out new ideas. Some of his subsequent output didn’t fall too far from the tree: He and Simian Mobile Disco’s Jas Shaw teamed up as Selling for a 2018 album that, despite the absence of samples, shared Gold Panda’s genial gleam. But as DJ Jenifa, he opted instead for club-ready house bangers. He wandered even further afield as the semi-anonymous Softman, trading his trusty MPC for arcane software tools like Max and Pure Data, and ditching the secondhand wax in favor of bronze temple bells and coolly restrained minimal techno as frictionless and utilitarian as brushed stainless steel.

With The Work, Dicker returns to his principal project—and along with it, some old habits that he said he’d sworn off. Full of luminous harps, winsome vocal snippets, and the kind of gently swung rhythms that Saint Dilla set in stone, The Work is every bit as lush and sun-drenched as its predecessors. It also happens to be 11 songs long, with a neat, naturalistic, dawn-to-dusk arc. (Oops.) But whatever hopes of reinvention he might once have harbored, his return to his wheelhouse is hardly a bad thing; Dicker is, in fact, very good at being Gold Panda.

This sparkling strain of electronica, a lineage that descends through Boards of Canada and Four Tet, is an increasingly crowded lane, and in the hands of a less talented artist, it could easily turn to pastel mush. But despite the laid-back loops and unassuming air, Gold Panda’s music couldn’t easily be confused for mood-based playlist fodder. The grooves are too tangled, the tones too bruised. There’s a genuine emotional charge here, one that goes beyond the obvious nostalgia signaled by the crackle of scratchy vinyl. Clinging to his hangdog chord progressions and weeping-willow keyboards is a bittersweet air that suggests a guy not just idly jabbing at his drum pads but actively grappling with some heavy shit.