Fifty seconds into “Arriving in Petersburg,” the first track on Rose Alaimo’s new EP Steam and Railways, and I’m smiling broadly. She described it to me as “primarily an acoustic collection of songs,” so I went in expecting to hear spare arrangements featuring the singer and a guitar. Turns out she undersold the project. Sure, it’s “acoustic,” but it’s what I’d describe as “big acoustic,” calling to mind the heyday of MTV Unplugged—and the 90s more broadly. What really does it for me, though, are the harmonies, which have been Alaimo’s calling-card for years at this point: warm, lush, and joyful. The rest of the album follows suit: big, ringing snare drums, crunchy guitars in all the right places, and, yes, a healthy dose of acoustic guitars anchoring the proceedings in the real world.

The album’s title, by the way, comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which Alaimo describes as her favorite book: “It’s a phrase used in the book in a relevant context. Dostoevsky often used references of the railroads being built across Russia in his time as a metaphor for the influx of western influence on his society and the acceleration of modern life and there were aspects of this that concerned him. specifically, these aspects included a rise in nihilism, social fragmentation, and the loss of spiritual life and a moral core. He worried about a world where logic and facts would replace love and kindness and he used this backdrop to set up a world in his books where people face deep social, moral, and spiritual struggles. Given things happening in the world today, including all the new advances in AI and how this may shape us as a culture, it seems shockingly prescient.”