As far as local musicians go, the people have spoken: There’s no one like AE Bridger, there never has been, and there may never be. He’s his own creative force, seemingly free of the imitative brushstroke of influence.

On his latest album, Goth Prog Princess, Bridger experimented as always, but in a new direction. There’s no point trying to pin it down, but at various points on the album, there’s hints of the frentic energy of early Gang of Four, the adventurous spirit of a Heyday David Bowie or Captain Beefheart, and in an entirely inexplicable way, evocations of Jeff Buckley on acid. Not that it sounds remotely like any of those artists.

“As with anything I do,” Bridger says of the new direction, “it stems from a necessity for expression of my reality. In this case, I felt pretty extreme feelings of anger for months, and needed to displace those feelings before my head exploded.”

It was the anger, and his feeling that “nobody gave a shit about my more subtle material that I had spent half a decade refining. I felt that my music career was over, I felt discarded and disrespected by some of my peers, I felt angry about getting older and seeing my body fall apart, I felt like I had wasted my entire life learning a sacred language that was being desecrated by a materialist culture that I oppose.

“All of these things pissed me off a lot, so it came from a need to lash out in a way that wasn’t harmful to others.”

Goth Prog Princess was recorded in Montreal. Steve Cowan, from Surgeon, played drums. “The album is dedicated to Josh Reid,” Bridger adds, “and there will be a very small quantity of CDs available at the local CD mongers.”

Stream it or download it now on his Bandcamp or YouTube page.