Last week, Porter Robinson gave away his designer clothes to fans based on what he deemed a vibe assessment. As hundreds of fans in LA lined up (and thousands more watched on Twitch), a few signs sat on the door explaining the event and its single rule: “no words will be exchanged,” they said. “if you speak you will be kicked out.”

For seemingly the first time in his career, Robinson is putting some distance between himself and his fans. On SMILE! :D, his third album, he holds the toxicity of fan culture — and its impact on him — under a microscope. At the same time, though, he just generally has a lot of fun with it. (He did promise that it would be his “most fun, and maybe my most heartbreaking album,” after all.)

Leading up to the album’s release, he certainly made the first part of that promise clear — before he gave away his designer clothes, he proclaimed that he has “Furry Swag” and piloted the giant inflatable Porter Robinson that appears on the album cover like an Evangelion and even appeared in his own cute little Katamari Damacy-esque minigame you can play on his website.

It’s all perfect for an album that is, at its core, just so chronically online. Even in some of his most sincere moments, Robinson uses witty quips to diffuse the tension, like he’s awkwardly making a self-deprecating joke in the middle of a revealing face-to-face chat. At the end of single “Russian Roulette,” Robinson pauses the song’s slightly saccharine, cathartic examination of suicidal ideation to deliver a weirdly comforting last message spoken in a robotic voice (the same one used in Radiohead’s terrifying “Fitter Happier” — isn’t it weird how this voice is less scary now?): “Don’t kill yourself, you idiot.”

Instrumentally, Robinson is at his most interesting and unpredictable here as well. At its core, SMILE! :D is a really formulaic indie pop album, but even in its poppiest tracks, it’s full of curveballs like tinges of emo, distorted chiptune, and even indie folk. (Also thrown into the mix: a lovable Frost Children cameo and a really long Lil Wayne interview snippet.) And Robinson still manages to include little details that remind us of the rest of the Porter-verse, like a lyric that calls back to “Sad Machine” and a weirdly nostalgic moment where he uses the same vocal effects he used throughout Nurture.

The singles especially are just straight up really fun. I could not tell you how many times I’ve listened to “Cheerleader” (but Last.fm could!), yet I’m still not tired of that euphoric guitar riff and the little chants in the background.

At the same time, though, it’s also deeply revealing, tackling quite a few of Robinson’s own struggles. He clings to some largely relatable sentiments through these examinations — the consumingly catchy “Kitsune Maison Freestyle” dissects his own use of fashion as a replacement for happiness, the devastating “Easier to Love You” serves as a conversation between Robinson’s past and present selves, and “Is There Really No Happiness?” touches on nostalgia, kicking off with the especially potent lyrics “I remember the family PC / There was snow in the hallways, there was blood on my teeth.”

But, in moments when Robinson does discuss his struggles that are explicitly tied to fame, it creates a totally different sense of distance between him and his listeners. It’s clear he’s at his most honest yet in these moments. But, at the same time, It’s just a little weird for me, someone who is not famous, to not be able to connect with these chunks that are so pertinent to the message of an otherwise relatable album.

All of these moments tie fantastic songs together, and it’s great that he’s opening up about these things, but at the same time, it’s a little jarring for musings on universal feelings like nostalgia and love and insecurities to suddenly segue into these sentiments that are miles beyond my tax bracket. In the adorably twinkly “Perfect Pinterest Garden,” he imagines escaping fame: “Hold on, darling / I know a place where I won't be spotted / A perfect Pinterest garden / I'll get a job, two kids, restart it, ah.” On pop track “Knock Yourself Out XD,” he recounts a poorly timed fan encounter: “Physically sick / Crying at the airport / ‘I'm sorry, can I get a pic?’” And on lead single “Cheerleader,” he digs into parasocial relationships, fans’ sense of entitlement, and the sense of codependency it’s given him. (In the song’s stellar music video, fans wearing Porter Robinson masks chase after him and even crash through his window.)

I’m sure SMILE! :D is Robinson’s most heartbreaking album yet in his eyes, but it’s hard for me to feel anything beyond sympathy for him or even guilt in these moments — at its best, they made me examine my own interactions with artists I’ve loved in the past. (I guess they’ve even made me look at the way I’m listening to SMILE! :D. Maybe demanding relatability from an artist who is clearly opening up about his own struggles makes me just as bad as the fans he sings about on this album. Who knows?)

Either way, there’s a joke among Robinson’s fans about people always complaining about his frequent jumps between genres and comparing new eras to older ones, but it’s hard to avoid a comparison in this case, so I’ll do it anyway — Nurture’s themes of self-criticism and struggling to create are so universal that it’s hard not to feel like these fame-focused chunks of SMILE! :D might end up being more of an emotional roadblock for most listeners.

Still, there are some really earnest moments amidst this chaotic sea of introspection that make me love it anyway. The album ends on “Everything To Me,” a love letter, albeit a slightly hesitant one, to his fans. It seems like Robinson’s Get Out of Jail Free Card, his way of saying “Please don’t be mad at me! >_<,” which is admittedly a little funny to think about — what if this was mandated by his manager? — but just a really beautifully written song that lets him find closure in the final moments of this sincere album. Even if his fans drive him insane at times, and even though it probably feels weird as hell to say you love your fans without knowing them, he loves them back.

So, hey, SMILE! :D isn’t Nurture for me, and it misses out on its promise of being super heartbreaking — I’m probably not going to shed a tear or two to “Everything To Me” or “Easier to Love You” like I admittedly have to a few songs off of Nurture. But that’s okay, that’s great, even! It’s an impressively vulnerable album to funnel through a traditional pop format (and it’s also full of songs that are just really, really fun). Better yet, it likely was just as cathartic, if not more, for Robinson to write, and that’s what music is supposed to be, even if it’s a little bit alienating and weird to listen to on the other side.