As dreamy and expansive as Gordi’s music can get, Australian songwriter Sophie Payten always grounds her work with strong emotional gravity. She first began layering folk and electronic textures in the mid-2010s, breaking through to a global audience with 2015’s “Can We Work It Out” and 2017’s “Heaven I Know.” In 2016, she signed to Jagjaguwar, home to Bon Iver and Sharon Van Etten. That same year, Payten recast Courtney Barnett’s verbose panic-attack account “Avant Gardener” as a moody piano ballad, and in early 2020 she detailed her own similar experience on the stripped-bare “Aeroplane Bathroom.” Payten continued to dig into her personal life on 2020’s Our Two Skins, informed in turn by grief, her queer identity, and, on “Extraordinary Life,” a stirring sense of hopefulness and devotion toward her partner. A similar swell of romance infuses the stark 2022 love song “Way I Go,” while 2025’s “Peripheral Lover” takes a more sweeping, dance-driven approach to urgent matters of the heart.