Gelli Haha made a record about being weird on purpose, and the achievement is that it does not feel like a bit. Switcheroo, the debut LP from Angel Abaya, is thirty-four minutes of alternative pop that commits so hard to its own absurdist logic that it eventually becomes its own genre. You can call it art pop if you want. The artist calls it the Gelliverse. She is not wrong.

The album opens with Funny Music, which sounds like a challenge. What follows earns it. Tracks like Piss Artist and Bounce House are riotously constructed, full of stutter-step percussion, bizarre sound effects, and hooks that catch you off guard precisely because they are buried inside jokes. Sean Guerin’s production is meticulous in the way that good comedy writing is meticulous: every move is deliberate, every punchline has setup. The record would fall apart if the architecture were not solid, and it is.

What keeps Switcheroo from being merely a novelty is that Abaya can actually sing. She is not hiding behind the absurdism. The voice is there and it is doing real work, shaping the emotional texture of songs that are, under all the funny noises, actually about loneliness and desire and the strange vertigo of being a person. Tiramisu is almost tender. Johnny is weird and sad in a way that sticks. Pluto Is Not a Planet It’s a Restaurant closes the record on a ten-second note that lands like a genuine surprise.

There is a long tradition of this kind of record, the one that arrives disguised as a joke and turns out to be serious about something. Ween had it. Early Sparks had it. The Magnetic Fields in their best moments. Switcheroo earns its place in that company, not because it is imitating any of them but because it has figured out its own version of the same trick.

Gelli Haha just kicked off a major North American tour, and if the live show has even half the commitment of this record, it is going to be a great spring. The album has been out since last summer, but it feels newly relevant right now, which is what a good record does. It waits for you to catch up.