Yet he has also found something to embrace in the cultural mix of its big cities, which he sees as a truer reflection of what America is: “We all are kind of thrown in together in this country and that is an opportunity to try to find common ground with people that are different from you.”

Musically, Life in Small Spaces also represents a subtle departure. Black Marble’s pop sensibilities remain, but walls of synths make more room for staccato guitar lines and live drum samples, drawing on artists such as Pylon, The Necessaries, Wire, and R. Stevie Moore. Stewart describes the resulting atmosphere as having “this chimey, hypnotic quality, like a radio dial that is between two stations,” a fitting description for a record that hovers between eras.

That sense of solitary experimentation has always been part of Black Marble’s practice. Stewart works alone partly because it allows him to make a living without splitting an already limited financial return between a large group of collaborators. But there is something more instinctive behind it, too. As a child, he spent hours alone in his room drawing and creating things, showing the results to his family before returning to make something else. Making music, he says, still feels strangely similar – “only now the audience is the internet.”

He’s managed to turn that small room’s limitations into more of a philosophy. The artwork for Life in Small Spaces places Stewart alone in a sparse room, surrounded by an eruption of confetti: it’s a self-contained world that may look cramped or chaotic, but belongs entirely to him. “I made Life in Small Spaces while thinking about that,” Stewart concludes. An artistic life, he believes, “does not have to be an endless pursuit of something just beyond reach. It can be small, difficult, and materially imperfect, while still being enough.”