“On my first record, it was really hard to find a place to put in the vocal melodies,” Marnie Stern once said of her 2007 debut. Listening back to the album, a wall-to-wall thicket of writhing, wriggling riffs, heavily reliant on Stern’s trademark two-handed tapping, it’s easy to sympathize with her plight. But the solutions she devised turned out to be the hallmark that distinguished her output from that of her heroes, including ‘90s and early-2000s math-rock luminaries Don Caballero and Hella (whose prodigious drummer, Zach Hill, produced and played on Stern’s album). Stern’s sing-song melodies become a beacon on tracks like “Every Single Line Means Something,” a surreally poppy handhold for the listener lost in the spin-cycle blur.