For much of her career as Gordi, Sophie Payten has led a double life. As her career gained momentum, she was completing a medical school degree, and often studied on tour. “I remember being on tour with [Australian rockers] Gang of Youths and pacing back and forth with flash cards in the green room and someone was like, ‘You’re on in five minutes!’” she tells Xtra. “And I thought, How many more flash cards can I get in before we have to go on?”

She was set to complete her studies and hit the road for her 2020 sophomore album Our Two Skins when COVID-19 hit, and she was soon on the front lines, working 10- and 12-hour shifts in the hospital. “There was no world in which I was getting home and picking up my guitar and writing anything,” she says. “I had no energy to do that.” This led to an 18-month-long bout of writer’s block. She managed to put together some older ideas for her 2021 Inhuman EP, but she was too drained to write anything new.

Anyone who’s come across Gordi’s music, whether through her Troye Sivan collabs or needle drops on The Walking Dead and Grey’s Anatomy, knows how deeply emotional it is. Her music is an earthy, electroacoustic collage built upon Payten’s earthy alto, which she frequently manipulates and distorts like a more down-to-earth Imogen Heap. Multiple songs on Our Two Skins feature Payten at the piano with a spare vocoder or synth as the only embellishments; songs like “Radiator” are startlingly intimate outpourings of feeling. But being a doctor necessitates suppressing your emotions in order to be a sturdy presence when delivering bad news. That’s known among doctors as “detached concern,” and it’s something Payten had to adopt while in the thick of COVID. “When you’re the healthcare professional, it’s not your place to be the emotional person,” she says. “You have to just be the vessel.” After tough days, Payten would depart to her car and be overwhelmed by what she couldn’t feel in front of her patients.

Like Plasticine, her new album out this week, is the first time she’s explicitly drawn together her two lives. Its name is inspired by Payten’s time as a doctor in the depths of the pandemic, stretched in all directions like the titular modular clay. Appropriately, the album deals with the entire spectrum of human emotion. There’s cosmic queer ache on “Alien Cowboy” and a gritty recounting of her time in the hospital on “PVC Divide” (which features Hadestown composer Anaïs Mitchell), as well as the unexpected pop-punk of “Cutting Room Floor” and “Head Rush.” It’s the depth of Gordi’s songwriting and voice that ties it all together.

That would be a lot for anyone, but it’s not the only thing at stake on the album. On her last record, Our Two Skins, Payten was processing her feelings for another woman in real-time; the album is sparse but visceral. Even during the press cycle, Payten still hadn’t quite understood how she identified. “I remember having my first interview for that record, and the writer was like, ‘What was it like to realize you were gay?’ And I was like, Oh, my god, I don’t even know if I am.”

A lot has changed since then. The refrain on Like Plasticine’s standout track, “Consolation Prize”—“I’ll love you till the day I die/ I’ll be your consolation prize”—is Payten’s response to someone reluctant to celebrate her identity. In “Diluted,” she merges anger and joy: tense 7/4 verses blossom into a giant Sigur Rós-size outro, acknowledging how her loved one betrayed her while nodding to how she’ll grow beyond it.

The album is more of a team effort than previous Gordi records. Singer-songwriter SOAK, 100 Gecs and Jane Remover mixer Kayla Reagan, Silverchair associate Julian Hamilton and Australian musician Alex Lahey (who is also Payten’s partner) all appear on the credits. Advance singles like “Peripheral Lover” and “Cutting Room Floor” sound super glossy thanks to mixer Rich Costey. Payten hand-picked every player and engineer for each song, but multiple songs were made without any assistance: Payten made opener “GD (Goddamn),” a free-associative poem set to a lo-fi drum machine, entirely on her iPad, and it wound up as an advance single.

Both the fluidity of the album and the resilience that inspired its creation inform the title of Like Plasticine. “All of these forces have changed me, bent me into shape, melted me down and put me back into a different shape again,” she says. “But ultimately, plasticine is a substance you can’t break.”