The self-titled eighth album from Brooklyn-based virtuoso guitarist and songwriter Wendy Eisenberg is gentle, pastoral, sweet, charming and breezy with an outstanding technical complexity. It’s exceptionally complicated but also feels completely undemanding.

These are not simple songs. Wendy plays amazing fingerpicking throughout with rich chamber string arrangements and brushed percussion, with chord sequences that are consistently unpredictable, and yet the overall feeling is one of comfort, gentleness and warmth, with a rare combination of technical mastery and emotional accessibility. After a decade of genre-spanning work that has taken Eisenberg from noise punk to free jazz to art-rock and beyond, the dominant theme running throughout this album is optimism. Song titles like Old Myth Dying and Another Lifetime Floats Away tell stories of shedding the past that feel positive, liberating and hopeful rather than sorrowful, leaving things behind and feeling lighter for it.

The album opens with Take A Number, short and sweet, before Meaning Business arrives with gorgeously arranged formal chamber strings. The song refuses to follow any expected course, taking left turns you never saw coming and yet it doesn’t feel difficult. Some tracks feature full accompaniment while others are just Wendy and her guitar, and the longer songs stretch to five minutes and beyond giving everyone room to meander with purpose. It’s Here moves closer to traditional Americana with beautiful comforting slide guitar, and Will You Dare has that same gorgeous and traditional quality.

Vanity Paradox is one of the album’s intricate highlights with confusing chord sequences and a violin solo that recalls Warren Ellis of Dirty Three not playing a melody, but a kind of abrasive noise that should feel jarring but instead feels completely soothing. Curious Bird brings a skippier more playful energy carrying the folk tradition forward with inventiveness and joy, and The Ultraworld is deeply wistful, suddenly dropping into somewhere sad before finding its way back out again.

The Walls closes everything out with quiet intimacy. Wendy Eisenberg is a master of her instrument and an exceptional songwriter, and the album is gorgeous, thoughtful and deeply considered. She sounds like she’s smiling as she sings throughout, with an open and friendly delivery. In a back catalogue that includes noise punk and free jazz, this is quiet, intimate, vulnerable and exposed. She can convey entire arcs of emotion by changing the shape of simple chords with sudden left turns into melancholy and shifts into nostalgic reflection.

If this record has a natural audience above all others, it’s other guitarists who will understand how much she’s doing with such little apparent effort. That said, you don’t need to understand how it’s done to be completely swept up in it. The complexity is there for those who want to find it, but the comfortable, tender beauty gets there first.