Gia Rass is a virtual singer. Her voice and music are generated, but the lyrics come from a real person who wrote them about a real relationship that was "intense, complicated and deeply physical, with tenderness and genuine care existing alongside desire, shame, fear, control and manipulation." All of those complicated feelings fed into two records released at the same time. HARD LOVE, 12 tracks, is the relationship as it happened. HARD LOVE: DLC, five tracks, goes back to the same two people and digs into why they acted the way they did, exploring "learned ideas about love, avoidant attachment, projection, self-image and the possibility that neither person ever fully understood the other."

The first record jumps between genres a lot. "Bad" sounds like 2010, the dirty electropop and electro house years, when Ke$ha was everywhere and Britney had Femme Fatale out. "Crybaby" swings the other way into big grown-up emotional pop, somewhere near Florence + the Machine or Susanne Sundfør. "5:17" has an alt-rock edge and even a bit of pop-punk in it, which I didn't expect. "All the Way Down" dips into operatic rock of Muse and Queen. Then "Bad Habit" takes the old American songbook and transforms into something with Lana Del Rey's vibe. That's a lot of different records for one album, and it's on purpose. "The stylistic shifts across both records are intentional," the author told me. "I wanted the music to reflect the narrator's emotional instability, moving between desire and rejection, tenderness and cruelty, confidence and vulnerability."

"Use Me Up" has a very Euro dance feel, with some electro house mixed in. It's the song to kick your heels off and end up dancing barefoot on the bar. The words are less fun. The narrator's in a borrowed room, wearing "his t-shirt and somebody else's perfume," and I honestly can't tell whose perfume that is or who's cheating on whom. Nobody in this song seems to belong to anyone. There's the "you" who calls after midnight, forgets her name and remembers "the parts of me that serve you best." And there's a "he" who says he loves her, and she brushes him off: "sweetheart, that's a copy, a Xerox of a feeling that he hasn't got." The guy who uses her gets the whole chorus, and the one who might actually care gets called a photocopy. Her heart is "in the freezer next to the vodka" so it doesn't rot, which is one of the catchiest lines on the album. "Diet heartbreak, sugar-free love" is close behind.

"Hard Love" opens with big movie strings, full Hans Zimmer. The vocals on top of them are heartfelt and actually got to me. Finger snaps bring it back down to earth a little, and then the whole thing drops into a full-on dance track. It reminded me of Selena Gomez at her most dancefloor. The lyrics start with his words, not hers: "You said my neck tastes like vanilla, my pussy like a garden of Eden." It's crude and poetic at the same time. She calls his voice "like a lie I already believe in." The line that ties the two into a knot is "You touch me like you'll disappear, I hold you like you'll never leave." Two people in the same bed with completely different plans. He isn't just the cold one, either. His hands shake when he says her name, and he tells her he hates how much he needs her, so she isn't the only one hooked. The bridge is ruthless: "Maybe love shouldn't feel like withdrawal." Then comes the outro, where she repeats his compliments back like evidence: "You said vanilla, you said Eden. I believed you. I still do." And the song's finale marries the orchestra and the dancefloor, sending shivers down your spine.

The DLC in the title of the companion EP made me curious. I play games, and to me the word mostly means paying again for something that should have been in the box to begin with. Every so often it means an actual story expansion that turns the world you thought you knew upside down. Here it's obviously the second one.

The EP's standout track "Good Girl" goes back to the Lana Del Rey mood from "Bad Habit", with the same languid vocal floating over a vanilla sky. Toward the end, though, she starts singing like she's tearing herself open, a wounded lioness. The story here starts with her mother: "I haven't talked to my mother in years. Back when we did, she said nothing of love." What she got from her mom was "thank you," "be nice," and how to sit pretty. So she grows up believing love is a trade. A kiss for a kindness. A boy stays till morning and she calls that a sign. The chorus sounds like something she's said to herself so many times it stopped sounding strange: "Good girl, lie still. If he wants you, he loves you." It changes as the song goes on. By the last chorus it's "If he hurts you, you love him" and "If he comes back, he loves you. Right?" That "right?" is where she stops being sure. The bridge is a list of instructions, be sweet, be useful, be easy to hold, be grateful, and it breaks off in the middle of "Maybe that's…". There's also "red on my mouth and somebody's perfume", and if you just heard "Use Me Up" you'll notice the perfume coming back. After this song I went back to "Hard Love", and the "vanilla" and "Eden" she keeps quoting back at him make a lot more sense. Nobody had ever taught her the difference between being wanted and being loved.

Another standout is "Your Side". It mixes dance and country and has a bit of an Avicii feel. Musically it reminded me of "Dear Boy", his brilliant 2013 track with MØ. The two songs sound related and point in opposite directions. In "Dear Boy", MØ sings straight to him from inside the longing. She'd follow him anywhere and she's still romanticizing the whole wild thing. "Your Side" starts in a close place. It opens with a list of everything she knows about him: he takes his coffee black, he leaves his jacket in the car, there's a scar under his chin, he looks away before he lies. It sounds like proof of how close they were, until the pre-chorus adds "Or I thought I knew." And then she goes back over everything she accused him of.

The bridge flips the whole thing: "If you wrote this song, would I be cruel? Would I be distant?" For me that's the most painful question on either record and the moment of truth, because it says every song before it came from one side only. MØ never gets out of the longing in "Dear Boy". Gia gets out of it and finds out she may have been in love with a version of him she made up.

This honesty and openness is a good place two wrap up the two records. Somebody sat with these songs for months and was brave enough to put the ugly parts in: the neediness, the lies, the moment she admits she maybe never knew the man she spent twelve songs accusing.

The genre-hopping could sound excessive on paper, but it's super on point. It's a whole bunch of dancefloors, and each one has the same girl crying in the bathroom between songs. Both albums have a ton of memorable lines and melodies you can hum afterwards. Play HARD LOVE, then the DLC, then HARD LOVE again. The second time through it's a different album, and that's the best thing you can say about an expansion pack.