This is the first album from Montreal-based Laughing though its members are mostly veterans of other bands. Notably Josh Salter, one of three guitar/bass/singers, plays bass in Nap Eyes. Cole Woods led Winnipeg’s Human Music. Laura Jeffery, the drummer, was in Fountain. André Charles Thériault, the lone exception, hadn’t been in a band for over a decade when he joined.  What brought the four together was power pop and nailing its sweet but rowdy jangle-i-ness.

Well, mission achieved. Consider, for example, the single “Bruised,” with its yearning vocals (“When you said you didn’t care/I felt something inside me tear”), its rough slashes of guitar, its battering drum line, its seething harmonies, its spiraling licks. The song is nearly perfect in its roughed-up, cowlick-sticking-straight-up messiness. Barbs of dissonance jut out from its breezy choruses, like rusty wires in cotton candy; not too sweet, not too rough.

“Secret” is slower and more vulnerable—and it’ll give you a powerful jolt of Sweet-ish-ness, “You Don’t Love Me,” maybe or “Nothing Lasts.” The guitar rings like bells, the bass buzzes underneath, the drums shimmer and pulse. “Won’t you tell me something/no one else knows/let’s get as close as we can and put on one another’s clothes,” the singer intimates, echoing Girlfriend’s exuberant, “You can wear my clothes.”

That’s the final song, a silky comedown from bangers like “Easier Said” and “Sour Note.” It’s a nice ending to a near perfect summer album, which rocks and jangles and keens, balancing on a knife edge of hard and soft, joy and sadness, as all summer albums should.