Beginning with 2016's Pool, his second album under the Porches moniker, Aaron Maine fashioned a distinctively spare and brooding form of synthesizer song. Highly stylized and mostly self-recorded, the tracks have ranged from eerie synth pop to pining keyboard balladry, with an intimate, lovelorn melancholia dominating each album. He reinforces all of those qualities on a dramatic fourth long-player, Ricky Music. It represents Maine's first time working with a co-producer, Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Jacob Portrait, and was self-recorded at home and with Portrait at his Brooklyn studio. It opens with the restrained, pseudo-acoustic intro to "Patience." Electric piano, acoustic guitar, and string voices eventually give way to pulsing, overdriven synth tones and crashing mechanical beats. These types of broad, brash palette strokes continue throughout the record and help define it, while lyrics yearn for love in better circumstances. On the mood-swinging "Do U Wanna" ("I'm so happy I could die/Happy I could die/Happy I could die"), the singer's touch-and-go frame of mind is reflected in the juxtaposition of a feel-good melody, fragile vocals, soothing harmonic keys, and a strong drum machine groove alongside a jarring cowbell that's mixed conspicuously high. In keeping with a sense of unbalance, half-minute track "PFB" has relentless, jangly strummed guitar accompanying a repeated lyric about how bad things look. Later, an unidentifiable Mitski joins Maine for brief backup on "Madonna," a house-styled entry about jealousy, and Devonté Hynes and Zsela contribute to "Fuck_3," a sinuous track distinguished by its bass clarinet, harpsichord-like tones, and improvised percussion and piano. The album closes with the emotionally fitting "Wrote Some Songs," a suicide fantasy about having to answer for his life at the pearly gates. Taken together, Ricky Music's high-contrast, theatrical style plays out like a mini (24-minute) chamber-synth song cycle about infatuation, sex, and heartbreak -- with just enough balance between candidness and self-awareness to keep us rooting for the lead.