There’s a moment on “Secret Language,” the lead single from Ryan Beatty’s fourth album Sweet Fortune, where he asks, “Did you hear what my words couldn’t tell?” Coming from a songwriter whose gift for linguistic precision has become almost preternatural, it’s a striking admission. Beatty has spent the better part of the last decade rendering the ineffable into crystalline detail, penning songs for everyone from Tyler, The Creator to Beyoncé – the latter collaboration earning him a Grammy for his work on Cowboy Carter. That makes the lyric’s suggestion – that some feelings remain stubbornly beyond language – all the more compelling.

The record’s opening track, “Phantom,” drifts in on a bed of illuminated piano chords before unwinding into a cathartic orchestral passage, strings blooming around Beatty’s voice like a long-exhaled breath. By contrast, “Delancey” opens with glacial, frostbitten keys, Clairo’s guest vocal threading through Beatty’s delicate tenor. “Love is so simple, and so hard to find, I look for it in pictures, I look for it in wine,” he croons, collapsing romance into a series of fleeting substitutes, each one suggesting both proximity and absence.

Across Sweet Fortune, that push and pull between articulation and evasion becomes less of a contradiction and more of a working method. Where his previous LP, Calico, often felt like a record carved from stillness, here Beatty allows arrangements to expand and contract around a voice that remains unhurried and exacting in its restraint. Even its most sweeping moments feel tethered to something intimate, as if scale is being used not for grandeur but for proximity. It’s a subtle but meaningful shift, not abandoning the careful control that has defined Beatty’s recent work so much as opening it up and finding a warmer register within it.