No Swoon opens their upcoming self-titled LP with startling admissions. “I don’t know what’s my own,” Tasha Abbott intones on the lead track. “I don’t know what’s controlled.” Her confusion is warranted given what feels like everyone’s current mental state—increasingly critical, and alienated by everything from misogyny to power imbalance to rising rents—and she and bassist and synthesizer Zack Nestel-Patt explore such themes in fittingly reciprocal form over the course of nine searingly critical tracks. Abbott’s distorted guitars are cradled by Nestel-Patt’s lulling synths and her own hypnotic vocals, the musical equivalent of a fever dream recalled with surprising sharpness.

Ambiguous yet urgent, No Swoon’s full-length debut searches for answers to questions that may never be resolved. “Kate” sinks inward, portraying a depressed woman whose numbness is compounded by the lack of empathy from those closest to her, whereas “Forward” frets about indifference on a global scale. “Is the ice really splitting? / Are the ceilings getting smaller? / Couldn’t notice through these headlines / Couldn’t notice through the mud.” The aforementioned “Don’t Wake Up, Wake Up”, their most straightforward rock ‘n’ roll track, finds the narrator existentially lost amid fuzzy, electronic rhythms reminiscent of Diiv and Joy Division. The LP reunites the band with producer Jorge Elbrecht (Wild Nothing, Japanese Breakfast) and adds Robi Gonzalez (A Place to Bury Strangers, This Will Destroy You) on drums.