Photo courtesy of Lemolo

Meagan Grandall, the singer and songwriter behind dream-pop project Lemolo, has a habit of drawing listeners in with the promise of shiny, poppy beats only to deliver with tracks that are thickly layered and often surprisingly mournful. “A lot of people have told me, ‘oh, you’re too bubbly. You should be more serious,’ ” said Grandall in an interview with KEXP. “And then other people have said, ‘you should really smile more.’ ” Lemolo’s music, across the landscape, reflects these oxymoronic expectations, subverting one-dimensional labels.

Her first album as Lemolo, 2012’s The Kaleidoscope, which she created with longtime friend and then-collaborator Kendra Cox, features a sparkling glass kaleidoscope on the album cover, pristine and neat in its construction. The music itself contrasts this image in its melancholia, echoing into atmospheric, haunting spaces.

On Lemolo’s newest release, the solo album Swansea, Grandall exhibits a similar duality. The promotional photo for Swansea features Grandall on a lemon-yellow canvas, playing up the brightness of her moniker, Lemolo. Her aquamarine eyeliner matches the sparkly, playful cocktail dress she wears on the cover of the album as she gazes cryptically toward the sea.

Like The Kaleidoscope, the content of Swansea is similarly disarming. For Grandall, “Swansea” has little to do with its namesake city in Wales; she defines “Swansea” as “the vast place we find ourselves in when we lose someone.” In her solitude, Grandall finds a tranquil equilibrium between the sadness of loss and the strength that she garners through overcoming adversity. “I didn’t know all I needed to do was let go of the line / I didn’t know at the time that as long as I float I’ll be fine,” she repeats throughout the eponymous track like a meditative mantra.

The “sea” portion of “Swansea” appears as a motif throughout the album, though the sea setting that continues throughout Swansea isn’t entirely metaphorical. Grandall grew up in Poulsbo, Washington, nestled between Liberty Bay and Puget Sound, and the name “Lemolo” comes from the small neighborhood she lives in.

Taught how to sail as a child, Grandall says it is one of the few things she gets excited about as much as music. The album standout, “High Tide” is at once a metaphor for finding freedom from the expectations of others as it is about the literal freedom of leaving port to sail. The melody ebbs and flows like the tide, and the chorus bursts forth with a triumphant sense of breaking free to open sea.

Though Grandall’s sound fits comfortably into the dream-pop niche, it’s somewhat dissimilar to the version that dominates the Seattle scene. Her style invites comparison to ethereal, witch-house duo Purity Ring or Finnish-French indie-pop band The Dø. In Grandall’s work, the dream-pop genre takes on a literal sense: she crafts sweeping dreamscapes that feel eerily adjacent to our own world, and her lamenting vocals, along with elegiac strings and piano, trace a distinctive path through the album. Her “Swansea” is a distinct mental terrain in which she works through the wounds inflicted on solid ground. It’s a place where she can express painful themes without having to feel them fully, fashioning art that is as constant and unconquerable as the sea.