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After an almost three-year hiatus, armed with a cognizantly smokier eyeshadow look (or perhaps just darker eyebags), Joji returned Oct. 14 with trip-hop single “PIXELATED KISSES.” This is the first work released under Palace Creek, his independent record label.

The cover art, which depicts convoluted cables with a hungry red background, foregrounds a techno-pessimistic frustration. The track itself is brief, lasting just one minute and 50 seconds.

On first listen, the most salient shift from “old” Joji’s sound is a growling bass that would put any speaker’s woofer to work. However, his vulnerable voice has remained unchanged since his break, espousing familiarly melancholic lyrics throughout.

In the chorus, Joji begins with “Pixelated kisses got me goin’ insane / Replicate this moment from a million miles away.” Yearning for a physical love, he laments the nature of engaging in romance from space. Through video calls, phone calls, and text, the digitized traces of a once-in-the-flesh bond are breadcrumbs left for lapping up. “Waiting for the signal, baby, never make a sound” is an outcry for reciprocity as he yearns for a virtual tenderness predicated on his partner’s mutual investment.

With “If you never hear from me, all the satellites are down,” he decries today’s technologies for permitting connection while constantly delimiting togetherness. Dependent on data transmission and encryption, long-distance love is complicated by a spatial reality that separates people meant to touch each other. From his spaceship, Joji accepts these dependencies on technology, and the technological infrastructure itself as a contingent mediator — or inhibitor — of intimacy. He finally questions the sincerity of their rapport while he’s taken on this aerospace journey, asking, “Baby, are you really down?” upon his fall back to earth.

Interrogating others’ commitment to him is not new; he does so in many of his top songs, like “SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK” and “Die For You,” though these contemplate an ex-partner after ties have broken. Reminiscent of his other hits “Feeling Like the End” or “Before The Day Is Over,” his temporal position in this tune allows him to examine an ongoing, albeit dissociated, relationship.

With “PIXELATED KISSES,” Joji has re-emerged with a heavier trap sound and a cyber-surreal aesthetic, questioning his own faith in relationships once their tactile possibilities have been bitcrushed. Exploring a preemptive despair, Joji travels back in time and up in space, literally.