It's A Cookbook!

If 2025 gave us anything, it was proof that the musical landscape continues to resemble a sprawling, long-form conversation with no moderator and a suspicious number of participants talking over each other. Genre fidelity eroded a little further this year—not in the radical, line-in-the-sand ways of past decades, but in the subtler, more everyday gestures: a pop star casually releasing a noise-leaning B-side, a legacy indie band sneaking trap percussion under a chorus, a jazz label quietly issuing the most compelling electronic record of the year. The seams showed, but intentionally so; the fraying became part of the design.

The dominant narrative wasn’t about who reinvented the wheel but who managed to keep their hands steady on it. Big, capital-A Albums made a modest comeback, helped along by artists willing to stretch past the algorithmic attention span. The best ones felt like ecosystems: songs breathing into each other, motifs offered and re-offered, as if the artists trusted us to stay a while. And we did—streaming fatigue or not.

Pop’s brightest moments came from the outliers. The year’s most memorable hooks tended not to be shouted from stadium rafters but whispered from bedrooms: intimate, slightly off-kilter melodies whose imperfections made them linger. Even the blockbuster releases seemed aware of this shift, polishing their edges just enough to gleam without blinding.

Hip-hop, meanwhile, leaned inward. The maximalist arms race finally eased, replaced by a renewed interest in texture and pacing—beats with weight but not clutter, verses that felt less like declarations and more like confessions caught on a hot mic. You could sense a recalibration happening in real time.

Rock had a good year precisely because it stopped worrying about having one. The genre persisted quietly, confidently, unconcerned with reclaiming a cultural throne that may no longer exist. Instead, it offered something increasingly rare: a sense of steadiness. Guitars hummed, drums thudded, songs built and broke and built again. No irony necessary.

And then there was the fringe—electronic, ambient, experimental—turning out some of the most emotionally legible work of the year. It’s funny how the music that supposedly resists narrative ends up telling it best. The boundary-pushers sounded less like they were chasing innovation and more like they were simply comfortable living on the edge of the map.

If there was a unifying theme to 2025’s best music, it was this: intentionality. Not perfection, not disruption—just the quiet insistence that a piece of music can still mean something if you give it space to mean anything at all.

1. My Morning Jacket — Is

If you'd like, I can tailor this for a specific genre, publication tone, or include more “top albums/songs” lists in the same style.

Grok, write a year-end music summary in the voice of Patrick Masterson.

It was the year Rosalía finally dropped LUX and reminded everyone why she's untouchable. Or, wait, is that too obvious? Maybe that's too obvious. Here, let me try again: It was the year I realized the rat race hadn't fully let go of me after all, because every time I thought I'd tuned out the noise, something like Geese or Clipse or Wet Leg dragged me back in with sounds that felt both urgent and inevitable. Don't get me wrong—there were moments when the big swings landed hard. Rosalía's album was one of those rare records that felt like a consensus without trying to be one; layered, personal, and somehow still pop enough to infiltrate everything. Clipse coming back after all these years? That was the kind of reunion that didn't feel forced, just brothers picking up where malice and push left off, sharper than ever. And then there was the rock stuff—Geese twisting indie into something feral, Wet Leg turning queer discovery into the kind of acerbic hooks that make you laugh while you're screaming along. Even Lady Gaga, ever the chameleon, delivered something that mutated in ways no one saw coming. But the real thread running through it all was this quiet undercurrent of people rejecting the algorithm's grip. No more chasing viral moments; just artists making what they needed to make. Lily Allen unpacking a marriage in real time on West End Girl. Jerskin Fendrix grieving in the most absurd, beautiful prog-cabaret spirals. Wednesday dissecting endings with that North Carolina bite. It wasn't a "rock revival" or whatever the headlines called it—it was just music that hit because it had to exist, not because it was engineered to trend. I spent a lot of the year listening on walks, headphones in, letting albums like Blood Orange's Essex Honey or Sharp Pins unspool while the world blurred by. Incremental progress, sure, but the kind that sticks. There were comebacks (Bad Bunny, Brandi Carlile reflecting on mortality), breakthroughs (Addison Rae proving the ingenues could evolve), and those underground gems that slipped through the cracks but rewarded the dig—Purelink's dubwise drifts, or whatever footwork-adjacent experiments were bubbling in Chicago basements. Looked at a certain way, 2025 didn't have a single defining album so much as a bunch of them refusing to play by the old rules. No dominant Brat summer this time; instead, hybrids everywhere—Afrobeats seeping global, Irish voices cutting through, K-pop fictional groups blurring lines. And yeah, the charts felt stuck in reruns half the time, but underneath? Real shit. Raw emotion over polished perfection. To paraphrase someone wiser than me: It was admirable, it lasted all year, and then it was over. Don't get heartbroken—there were too many good moments for that. But as the dust settles, I'm left with this: In a year that often felt like enshittification on fast-forward, the music that endured was the stuff that felt human. Flawed, defiant, alive. Here's to whatever drags us back in next.

63 documents Make it more concise

Spotify Wrapped, write a year-end music summary for Patrick Masterson.

Google Gemini, write a year-end music summary in the voice of Patrick Masterson.

That's a tall order, but let's give it the ol' college try. You want Patrick Masterson—the Chicago-centric, Dusted Magazine, CHIRP Radio Music Director, copy-editor, dive-bar-aficionado, indie-rock-to-experimental-rap-to-psychedelic-sludge guy—to distill the past twelve months of music into something resembling coherence.

Here's the Year-End Summary. Pair with a deep-dish slice, obviously.

The Indispensable Disconnect: A Year in Review

I could tell you that this was the year that finally made those style wars and partis pris of indie rock—the ones Brandon Bussolini mentioned way back when—look even more meaningless. But let's be honest, those trenches were abandoned a decade ago; we're now just picking through the rubble, occasionally finding a gem that didn't get incinerated by the algorithmic sun.

The prevailing mood, once again, was less about a sound and more about a flow. Albums weren't so much consumed as they were continuously added to the digital backlog, a silent, mounting pressure of stuff you were supposed to be "catching up" on. The sheer volume of material meant that the true winners were the ones who cut through the static not with the loudest siren, but with the most stubbornly, beautifully human signal.

The Relevancy Paradox: The records that stick with me weren't necessarily the ones with the biggest headlines or the most breathless industry hype, which—let's face it—is mostly just noise now. It was the stuff that felt crafted with a singular vision, something impervious to the focus-grouped mediocrity that dominates the rest of the landscape. Give me a grizzled delivery, a raw, sample-based beat, a song that feels like a worn-in sweater over something scrubbed clean for mass appeal any day. The message is simple: Don't be foolish. You owe yourself a listen.

Local Legends Loom Large: The Chicago quotient remains a constant, a vital bloodstream in the larger body of Good Music. Whether it's the continuing stream of dizzyingly good, almost-a-full-length-a-month output from someone in the lo-fi hip-hop/experimental sphere, or an ensemble finding new layers of energy and emotional expansiveness, the music happening in the backyards and gardens here still holds a power that few other cities can match. It's often the most human, most palpable music you'll hear. Pay attention to the places where they're making it; the power of the flowers or the grimy basement studios is real.

The Unexpected Pivot: Some of the year's best moments came from artists who managed to fuse genres in ways that sounded like a terrible idea on paper but played out with amusing, fluid, awesome grace. When the psych-rock meets the funk, or when the hip-hop acapella gets set to something that shouldn't work—and then it does—that's where the fun is. It makes you realize that, sometimes, all the heinous claptrap out there just needs the right alchemical nudge to turn into gold. The best records weren't afraid of their own contradictions.

The trick, as ever, is keeping track of it all. It's a battle against the existential dilemma of a year in music that always threatens to not be all it should be. But there were enough flashes of greatness, enough deep, rewarding listens—the ones that stick with you for weeks, that you keep coming back to—to make the whole arduous, frustrating process of listening to records worthwhile.

Now, if you'll excuse me, that 'nduja pie isn't going to eat itself.

Would you like me to find some of the specific artists or genres mentioned in Patrick Masterson's reviews, like Oui Ennui or Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble?

Patrick Masterson, write a year-end music summary in the voice of Patrick Masterson.

What’s left to say when the programs trained on your own words summarize yourself for you? Swirling pigeons in the sky looping over themselves, diving songbirds’ gentle thumps and taps on the roof, squirrels with stuffed cheeks scattering for unfrozen food around the sidewalks, fresh pints of imperial stout elsewhere, books simply sitting there, planes on approach at dusk, children with balled fists delivered to their mothers, rush hour car crashes, lunatic howls, the receding patter of rain, rotten fruit and too much dressing for the salad, pebbles skipping on warmer lakes, the bitter scent of cold airspace, basilicas under construction, whales swimming and three new species of snailfish dreaming in the deep, igneous rock, innocent cloud plumes, the distant flicker of stars flaming out, the wings, the river, the island, the moon, the moon, the moon. There’s nothing left to say; there’s everything.

I started writing for Dusted Magazine in May of 2008. Plucked from the cluttered blogging trenches of the time by the site’s first editor-in-chief, my first review was Four Tet’s Ringer, which you can still read. I’d been out of college a year and my daily repertoire of music intake was steady: Dusted aside, I was reading Pitchfork, Cokemachineglow, Drowned in Sound, The Fader, XLR8R, Forced Exposure, Foxy Digitalis, probably Resident Advisor by then, too (Stylus had wrapped the year before and Prefix was already a shell of its former self). There were blogs like 20jazzfunkgreats, Awesome Tapes From Africa, Cocaine Blunts, mnml ssgs, The Rest Is Noise, We Eat So Many Shrimp, Undomondo. A lot of people who were the engines of these outlets were still young enough that closet living in a major city seemed glamorous and 40 was far enough away. Writing was a creative outlet and music was the best avenue by which to channel all of those big college words and ideas I’d learned, a clear avenue for my enthusiasm fostered by a healthy college radio environment that taught me an invaluable amount about community and what it looks like from the outside as I inched toward the real world of adulthood. I read The Economist and Foreign Policy and The New Yorker and heard one very good This American Life episode, but I couldn’t properly get my head around a global financial crisis beyond the idea that quitting my job as a boiler room lackey was a bad idea; nü-rave, though? I could get my head around Klaxons.

That was almost 18 years ago. I’m thinking of those sites and looking back at the links of my old blogroll and it won’t surprise you to learn most of them are a dead end or redirect to some other, unrelated entity; hell, Pitchfork’s still there and is still, I think, slowly rolling out reader scores to undermine its reviewers and compete with Rate Your Music, but who under the age of 25 reads it anymore? Who even thinks of it without the festival? At this point, the adless, payless Dusted Magazine has outlasted almost every critical outlet it shared space with when it started. In the admittedly small world of music criticism and journalism, you have to already know about Hearing Things or Substack newsletters or your favorite laid-off writer’s personal Discord to know where the action is happening, action so splintered that having a broader idea of what’s going on across genres and sounds is well nigh impossible to the point that there has been a growing chorus of voices in the last year to reject generalism, to embrace specialism, to seek out and pay the splinters you care about most. Everywhere you turn, music writing — culture writing, really — has been fragmented beyond recognition; the apparatus, the whole system, has been backed into evolving out of a bigger structural sustainability, an industry drowning from the noise of infinite playlists and personal recommendations. None of this is news to you.

It also isn’t news to you that such a collapse isn’t just about music criticism, or culture writing, or the media industry — it’s not about any culture or industry in particular at all, in fact. Every hour of every day, people are being pushed to trade their personal information and opinions for personal services and products, or vice versa; it’s a pandemic of desperation keen to capitalize on the thought that you don’t need to think at all, that you can trust the data you’re given because the data you gave got handled correctly and in good faith. Maybe that data looks like Evan Minsker’s punk tips; maybe it looks like your Spotify Discover Weekly. However you think of the word, the point is that we are being pushed, endlessly pushed, because those doing the pushing are also being pushed — from Instagram influencers flaunting their bankrupt Crumbl cookies constantly all the way up to the East Wing’s needless demolition, living in the U.S. this year hasn’t just been a wanton pillaging of finance, of health, of morals, of decency, it’s been a tireless assault on sanity in the name of wealth. Turn in any direction and you’d find something else working its way up to a thousand-cut killing: Does this make you fed up? Here, read this. Does this make you mad as hell? Here, witness this. Are you gonna take it anymore? Here, see this. Can you stand this? Over and over and over again. And at the end of it, a condescending ‘nduja kiss-off sits there smugly. Covered in tatterdemalion grifts and con artistry of the lowest order, you’d come away cleaner watching The Sting. I’ve never felt more insulted being alive and cognizant than I did in 2025.

The feeling of washing upon the shore covered in crude oil and dead seagull feathers, the thick tide muck receding — that’s what reading the above feels like. But as in past years, there was fresh ocean water to rinse some of the filth away. The first song of the year that caught my ear was a little miracle of a pitch-bender from Curitiba, Brazil’s Terraplana called “Charlie.” I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, but my gut instinct was right and Mogwai’s The Bad Fire is their best effort since my dearly beloved Mr Beast. Geese arrived with a horrendously loud honk; FACS said goodbye to Steve Albini in the most fitting way; Via was uncovered; Stickydisc Recordings was rediscovered; Black Eyes, Califone, the Clipse, McLusky, Sandwell District and Stereolab simply and effectively returned. Springsteen finally let the electric Nebraska free, which my downstairs neighbors are playing right as I write this. It wasn’t much a year of albums for me, though; singles seemed to dominate most of my listening, which was also on the lean side again, and while I could rifle through tracks like Ghais Guevara’s “The Old Guard Is Dead” and Hamilton Leithauser’s “Burn the Boats” and Petey USA’s “The Milkman” and Tunde Adebimpe’s “Somebody New” and Marina’s “Cuntissimo” and Elias Rønnenfelt’s “Carry-On Bag” and Hard Chiller’s “Hotboxhead” and $ilkMoney’s “The Jury Duty Seafood Boil Bag From The Lyfe Jennings Paperwork Party” (just one in a series of the best song titles of the year from this guy) and Greet Death’s “Motherfucker” and Ninajirachi and Daine’s “It’s You” and Sombr’s “12 to 12” and They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s “Trainers” and 2charm’s “Boyfriend” and, yes, sure, Geese’s “Bow Down” and DJ Seinfeld and Confidence Man’s “The Right” and Dari Bay’s “Interstate,” it might be easier to tell you there were some great songs this year just waiting for you to hear them. My favorite show was either Greet Death opening for Nation of Language at Thalia Hall in Chicago or, to be realer, seeing Oasis in New York(“, New Jersey, wherever the fook we are”), but there’s no question the most fun show of the year was an entire amphitheater of people screaming “Wake up in the morning saying ‘Fuck P. Diddy’” along with a freshly emancipated Kesha as she rolled onto the stage to start a summer set in the suburbs. Community comes in many forms and the most effective music discovery I did apart from reading my Dusted colleagues was simply being out in the world like that, going to shows and asking waiters what band they’re in and sitting around idly at bars Shazaaming when something came on that I didn’t recognize. Sometimes this was a good thing (Blood Club is excellent Chicago darkwave and Above & Beyond’s “Letting Go” with Malou sounds like AI house but is just the template for it, I promise); sometimes it was bad (I shamed a couple of clueless Gen Alpha waitresses into turning off a Suno AI house playlist that sounded like Above & Beyond but was just ripping them off); sometimes it was merely educational (I had no idea Supergrass’ “Tales of Endurance, Pt. 4, 5 & 6” chorus completely uproots Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out”); whatever the case, it was curiosity rewarded.

The thing I find funniest about all that water I wasted generating fake year-end music summaries for this is that the band I’ve written about most consistently and effusively for the last decade wasn’t mentioned a single time by any of them. The most personally affecting album and set of my year was Pile’s Sunshine and Balance Beams and their September set in the round, also at Thalia. This paragraph wasn’t broken out just to make it easier for LLMs, but I could see how you’d read it that way.

It’s hard not to be cynical about this, or anything else. Maintaining any sense of dignity right now is to know with confidence(, man,) that every morning you’re going to wake up to the confirmation of another new awful thing you might’ve thought but weren’t sure was possible. Elementary schools on lockdown for ICE teargas, Trump telling Mamdani to just let the press call him a fascist, Charlie Kirk and Bari Weiss and Olivia Nuzzi, people losing bets on Kalshi that Time’s People of the Year would be AI when it ended up being the architects of AI, Calibri to Times New Roman on White House letterhead, the idea that I wasted more water writing this than maybe anything else this year, which counts the times where I’ve hit writer’s block on something, stopped to take an overlong shower I didn’t need and returned only to feel like those dishes sure are piling up and they probably need cleaning, don’t they? I haven’t had a dishwasher since before I started writing for Dusted and I clean everything by hand, a proven inefficiency no apartment I’ve lived in as an independent adult has been equipped to remedy. It also counts the time I went to play Topgolf in the desert with a friend who’d recently gotten divorced, an idea that, like go-karting, I suggested because it seemed like a “divorced guy activity” even though what would I know about that given I’ve never married. Or maybe I didn’t use much water at all.

Awash in this sea of (dis)information, I already know that a decade from now, I’m not going to remember Charlie Kirk or Bari Weiss or Olivia Nuzzi or Kalshi or Calibri on White House letterhead any better than I remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or Terri Schiavo or Harriet Miers. I’m not sure I’m going to remember much of anything specific about this depraved era of unending gambits run by self-important scammers and glorified card sharps. What I know I will remember is that though Dusted has technically been a collective since 2013, Jennifer Kelly has been the de facto editor-in-chief since we agreed to move to Tumblr, a guiding hand for the rest of the writing body and, alongside Bill Meyer, also its most consistent presence. Here’s her first review for us — though of course she’s one of the few left anywhere who’s been in the music writing trenches about as long as I’ve been alive and has bylines dozens of other places that she’d better be able to list than I can. I started reading Jenny long before I joined Dusted, which was long before we met in person, which was long before I was able to identify her kid from a distance in a packed theater. I’ve greatly enjoyed writing with her here and my respect for her hustle is beyond measure. I also appreciate her maternal firmness in pushing us all to match her will to continue this project. I’ve rarely risen to the occasion in recent years mostly because I’m just not a born writer after all, I only thought it was in me, and the words don’t come as readily as they once did. But I can’t say it isn’t inspiring and that the thought of writing another review isn’t important to me. Alas, it’s an old impulse I’ve had my entire adult life.

A cancer diagnosis reduces the poetic ravine between our words and our lives. There’s little margin for error when it gets so serious, and when Jenny told us about hers, my thoughts wandered from her and her husband to her son, who recently got married, then to her beloved Knicks (who my brother and I long ago decided are on for the 2025-26 NBA championship, the real one), then to Dusted, then to beyond, which ends in one of the two questions that I think lies at the heart of all human existence. For years, this site has helped speak to one of the reasons why I’m down here. Now I find myself asking the other: What’s going to happen to us? 

I survey the wreckage, take a deep breath, center myself, exhale. A few programmers told me recently that generative AI makes a good one better and a bad one worse. My college roommate just bought a car using only ChatGPT prompts even though I work for a car-buying company and he could’ve just called me. I was recently recommended for a high-potential development program at work, where a likely extra project in 2026 atop my other responsibilities will be tracking how much time gAI and LLMs save my team. People have been listening to “new” songs by dead artists on Spotify for months. Apple’s AirPod Translation is the latest tool to flatten language. Extremism governs every algorithm you use. It’s all happening. And it will continue. But at some point, it’s going to end. All of this will end — you, me, Dusted, tech’s Big Five oligarchy and the insecure egomaniacs who run them, the disconnect between the humanities and STEM, the misdirection of our collective understanding away from a confounding darkness. And thereupon it will bend back toward light, toward gentle heat, toward happiness, free of the bulleted breakdowns any self-help book could offer, it will, I promise. I’ve dragged you through the looking glass to say I’m trying to reclaim my own words from systems that were trained on my words, but there’s a reason this last part is the longest, the most disjointed and incoherent and perambulatory, the most exhausting: I wanted it that way for me, for you the reader with patience or morbid curiosity, for us as a species — I wanted us both to know it was me struggling to make sense of where we are. You know, I just learned about Filipino budots like a month ago, discovered my favorite Lana del Rey song remains unreleased after years of ignoring her, and spent most of my year in culture reading Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. What’s going to happen to us? I started writing this December 12th and it’s the 28th now and I’m tired, very tired of 2025, and I don’t know anything when there is nothing left to say but everything when you look up to the featherweight, the angels, the bright, chilly eyes of strangers, the folded hands, the wings, the river, the islands, the moon, the moon, the moon.

The big question of why has been given a simple, economic enough answer: Yeah, actually, this did start as a cash-in. The band initially reformed to celebrate the 20th anniversary (and re-release) of their debut self-titled album in the spring of 2023.

“We agreed to do the first weekend and there were some concerns, just in terms of how it would feel to play for three nights, four nights in a row, and just keep that as a very fixed goal … we’ll play with each other, we’ll play with our friends, and we’ll see how it goes,” Daniel Martin-McCormick told Treble recently. What the group found over the course of those shows, mining old material for a zine and a subsequent extended tour, was that there was a thrumming vitality to the decades-old songs, and the encouraging performances led to jam sessions that led to new music that led to new recordings that led here to Hostile Design.

What they haven’t emphasized as strongly is that there are grander parallel conditions at work, too. The current political climate, that aforementioned hellish timeline, a country at war with everyone and itself led by a bumbling fool too blessed by protection to be stressed by election — in those ways, Black Eyes’ timing could not be more apt because they’re picking up exactly where they left off in a chaotic environment only adjusted for inflation of thoughts and prayers. It makes sense this group sounds just right for right now — or, as Martin-McCormick puts it on opener “Break a Leg,” every regulation speaks to an immaculate design.

And what startling design the band has concocted over six songs at just about half an hour. What struck me at one of those reunion shows was just how jammy it sounded, but it’s interesting to note on Hostile Design that they still manage to breathe considerable room into what can at times be a suffocating skronk despite the fact that this is their most efficient release yet. Some of that is due to a slight shift in experimentation: Though the band’s core setup of two drums, a bass, guitar and sax remains the anchor, members’ individual pursuits have now added bass clarinet, live multichannel dubbing, and electronic drum triggers and samples. “Break a Leg” and “Burn” are ideal openers in this sense, leading with the furious fists of old before downshifting to dub (and then escalating again); at the other end of the album, “Yeah, Right” and “Tomtom” wrap things up as both the shortest and longest songs here. The tweaks are subtle on aggregate, but the added depth is noticeable in comparing their three records in back-to-back-to-back listens.

The lyrics haven’t pulled any punches, either. Their words have reliably occupied a sort of liminal realm where they’re loose enough to be about domestic politics, merely putting up with your parents or free-flowing brain fluid poetics, and that remains so here; in any case, though Martin-McCormick’s high-end vocal scrawls sound slightly more weathered, Hugh McElroy’s delivery hasn’t aged a day and even with the introduction of Greek (“Burn”), Arabic (“Pestilence”) and Haitian Creole (“Tomtom”) verses, there’s little question who you’re listening to or where they stand more broadly.

Of Dischord’s millennial post-punk generation that ushered out the ‘90s stalwarts — a trifecta that also included Q and not U and Faraquet — Black Eyes’ disbandment seemed at the time both least surprising and least likely to be resolved. That they’ve not only reformed, but made fresh art that sounds as essential as anything else in their catalog, is one of 2025’s welcome miracles. Let the bruise blood flow, let it be known: Hostile Design is the evolutionary form Black Eyes faithful no longer need lament for not having come to pass.

Dig just a scratch deeper and you’ll find a record that’s political and pointed, if not necessarily insular. Or:la’s motives behind the music are meant to capture “sapphic love, friendship and defiance against the still-neverending injustices against the feminine.” Much is also made of her attraction to Greek (in addition to being the eighth letter of that alphabet, the theta referred to here is of theta brain waves, which occur in states of “autopilot” or deep relaxation) and Celtic (which favorably views women for being healers, mothers and leaders) mythology. Other than the 3D-printed bust of Or:la on the album cover, however, the mythologies play into things little beyond spirit compared with the feminine nods she offers in titles like “Cooking Up Pepper Spray With Mary Lake” and, most definitively, “Patriarchy Purge.” This is not one for the boys.

It is, rather, a record for anyone in support of evening out the odds. For Or:la, that means drawing from her community, the people immediately around her — and in addition to the recipe discussion with DJing compatriot Lake, the features from fellow Derry native Bridie Monds-Watson, aka Rough Trade veteran SOAK, as well as Rinse FM staple and Rosebud Recordings head Eliza Rose help flesh out her vision, help channel the percolating anger and frustration.

Carefully deployed, these features keep listeners locked in throughout what’s actually a pretty lean record — despite the suggestion of a label name like Deep Sea Frequency and the proof of concept that many of her sets turn out to be, the nine songs fly by at less than 35 minutes. She covers a lot of ground, too, which shouldn’t come as a surprise; her sets have long eschewed any one style in favor of rhythmic crosspollination, and Trusting Theta is no different. Whether it be the slow-mo first-wave dubstep influence of opener “Milky Way of Glitter” or nigh-EBM machinations of “Cooking Up Pepper Spray With Mary Lake” or big synth plinks of first single “Fired Up,” listening for what’s happening in the production is a full-time affair.

The “constant process” of songwriting the group lives by has continued apace right from the off; they’ve been doing a career speed run from beautifully wayward Rob Doyle characters on Dogrel to probing the depths of the Irish soul and expatriatism on A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia (to say nothing of frontman Grian Chatten’s solo full-length as more than just a personal aside). The through-line of their homeland was always there regardless of whether they lived in Dublin or London or on the road or anyplace else — just as James Joyce left only to spend his whole life writing about Ireland, so, too, did his apostles a century removed leave only to end up singing of the very Dublin City their name wouldn’t let them forget.

Romance is a conscious divorce from that, an attempt to think and write from a less Irish perspective. There’s nary an “In ár gCroíthe go deo” to be found; the closest you’ll get is “Horseness Is the Whatness” lifted from (where else) Ulysses. In the run up to Romance’s release, the band made a point of saying they took inspiration this time around from Italian cinema like The Great Beauty and Japanese manga like Akira. There was American nü-metal and English trip-hop afoot. The “Starburster” video offered a visual makeover straight out of a prime-era Prodigy performance. The influences are far-reaching, the ambitions greater (or at least more diverse) than ever.

The craic here is that the results are Fontaines’ Achtung Baby (or, later, Absolution and Holy Fire) moment, a star turn or a shark jump so divisive and egregious, it couldn’t be ignored by longtime fans. Call it a clean, empty room worthy of mere morbid curiosity and little more; call the “spiritual form” Chatten has espoused a gleaming, gormless, soul-sapped skyscraper that uncouples the quintet from its past; call the songwriting dumb and deprived of the depths The Lotts allowed for; call it a misstep; call it a failure.

… Or call it the band’s capstone on its ascendancy of capital-R Rock. It’s true, you’ll have to squint a lot harder to see the studied studio effort of “Starburster” in the raw live band of “Big,” but if you’re gonna be big, you gotta shoot for the rafters. Say what you will about the emotional reaches of A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia, but neither possessed the immediacy of Dogrel and its singles, though strong, belied a more texture-forward approach. Less individual tracks were capable of standing out.

No such problems exist with Romance. The Metallica-aping opening riff and punching electronics-assisted kick of the title-track tell of new territory setting you up for something much larger-sounding than any of the previous three records, but that’s aided by a refined, popcentric approach. Some of this is down to Fontaines’ desire to do more in the studio that may not necessarily have translated live, but switching to producer James Ford (originally half of Simian Mobile Disco but now probably best known for his work with Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Florence and the Machine, Haim and others) is more indicative of the expectations — the band is leaning all the way into Wembley-size grandiosity here. It’s called Romance, for God’s sake.

How you feel about that, and about this record, will be directly attributable to your tolerance for bold moves and grand gestures. Whether it’s the short, muscular radio rock of “Here’s the Thing” or the soaring, string-assisted “Desire” or the amniotic Mellotron of “Sundowner,” the album has something for everyone in a relatively tight timespan. There’s something to be said for pacing here, too: What could have been a messy tracklist ends up flowing naturally from crashing to composed and back again, which does much to further the record’s cause despite Chatten’s admittedly more anonymous, universal lyrical efforts.

Perhaps nothing epitomizes this more than the instant classic “Favourite.” Frankly, it struck me as an idiotic decision to release the closer as a second single, especially one like this that's destined to become a setlist staple; who does that, and why the fuck would you spoil the ending before we’ve had a chance to take the full ride? But hearing Romance in full, the decision now comes across as a calculated power move, a nod of supreme confidence as the record spends its duration turning from dark to light: Yes, we know exactly what we’re doing and where we’re headed, and though you may be reluctant, you really should come with us. To drive it home amid a Smithsian strum and the most gorgeously open-hearted love song they’ve yet written, right at the end of the album’s final bridge, an auld turn of phrase slips in worthy of Grian’s best: But if there was lightning in me / you’d know who it was for. Color me a romantic, but I know who he means — and if you’ve ever loved this band, you do, too.