The nostalgic 80s sound of vaporwave, the nocturnal funk-pop of Nite Jewel, the blissful Balearic songs of the Mood Hut label and the kind of balladry heard between bouts of dimension-crossing depravity at a Twin Peaks bar combine on the second album by US singer and producer JJ Weihl, AKA Discovery Zone.

The period detail is expertly rendered, from Fairlight-style ersatz choral vocals to the same upward-zooming synth sound used by Alice Coltrane on her meditation tapes to evoke an expanding mind – and, inevitably, there are sax solos. This palette often makes the numerous pop-ambient instrumentals here feel rather like the hold music for a healing-crystal company, and many of these are pretty forgettable.

But Weihl’s songwriting is much stronger. Pair a Dice has perky synthpop bobbing in an empty sea of minor chords, the perfect musical analogue for the lyrics: “How can you leave when you’re living in somebody else’s dream?” The innate melancholy of nostalgia, plus the comforting commercialism of 80s nostalgia in particular, is teased out by the album’s strongest melody on Mall of Luv – “Take me back to the Mall of Luv / I wanna buy it, I wanna live inside of it” – which will sate anyone who set their John Maus albums aside after he attended the 6 January Capitol riot. There’s also a touch of Julia Holter to Test, echoing as if in a long-vacated cabaret venue, and again the lyrics carry you out of the everyday: “Heaven is a place where there’s nothing you can buy / tomorrow waits for you, infinite surprise.” At her best, Weihl conjures the pasts we choose to remember but perhaps never even lived through – the collective fantasias of a culture in retreat from the horror of now.