In February, Zardoya, Evian, and Buccellati headed to upstate New York for three weeks of writing and recording—an unlikely setting for the San Juan-born artist. “I wanted to record somewhere totally out of my comfort zone, and outside of LA,” she explains. “I’m Puerto Rican and an island girly, so the polar opposite was going to upstate New York in the dead of winter.” Between sessions, they took long walks through the woods and ate farm-fresh duck eggs.

Melt’s softly gothic sound may feel familiar to fans of the Marías, whose production leaned toward the lush, layered, and hypnotic, but it’s slower, moodier. “The Marías are very much a band, but from day one, Josh and I have written all of the music. So what you get is 50-50 Josh’s musical DNA and mine,” Zardoya says. “Whereas with my solo project, I wanted this to feel like music you’d listen to in nature while sitting under a tree, or on the train looking out a window.” (If ever a song began to stray from the sensibility she was after, Zardoya recalls, she’d describe it as “not vampire enough!”)

Its tone draws as much from the wintry stillness of those New York woods as from Evian and Buccellati’s love of The Lord of the Rings (which, yes, they got Zardoya into, too). “Sam, Luca, and I worked so seamlessly because we have such similar musical DNA. We’re inspired by the same things,” Zardoya says. “A song called ‘Back to You’ felt like the stars were aligning—the melody came out of nowhere. We were all just in our little stations, creating, and then before we knew it, we had a whole song.” The trio were delighted to discover, after the song was finished, that the planets had quite literally been aligned that night.