Today, Cate Le Bon presents the new single and video, “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” from her new album, Michelangelo Dying, which will be out on September 26, through Mexican Summer. Following “Heaven Is No Feeling,” “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” serves as the album’s centerpiece with Le Bon powerfully evoking the simultaneous universality and unknowability of love. Her admission: “I thought about your mother / I hope she knew I loved her,” catches devastatingly in the chest.

Michelangelo Dying’s creation was led by pure emotion and usurping the album Le Bon thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love and in the process became a kind of exorcism.

What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up  but which in doing so, picks at it too. It is a record centered on the many states of existence within love and its aftermath as Le Bon found herself surrendering to the abstraction of intense feeling and the grieving of a fantasy.