The crackle of a Coke can. Metal crunches open; the aluminium fizzes. “Cold and sizzling”, remarks a disembodied advertisement, as the ecstatic sigh of the drinker announces the exhilaration of the fix. So begins alt-J’s newest album The Dream: a scintillating 40 minutes of indie folktronica that rushes the dopamine receptors and leaves them stunned and sated – lulled as if into a trance. It’s been four years since their last output, 2018’s remixed Reduxer, and a decade since the astounding success of their first record, the infamous An Awesome Wave. While this is most definitely an alt-J album (looping chord progressions; lyrics that, on first listen, verge on the nonsensical; vocalist Newman’s unsettling tightrope walk between melancholia and calm exhilaration), it manages to be a wonderfully unique one: a labyrinth of synthesised dreamscapes that leaves its listener in a state of ever-fluctuating unreality.

“Of course, this is an album for the 2020s, and its manic injections of imagery and hyperbole feel more than well aware of this”

The band’s lyrics are often anarchic, and yet soothingly so: ‘Bane’ takes a childish pleasure in its wordplay (“Pool cool, cooling by the side of the swimming pool”), while there is a tangible pleasure in third track ’Hard Drive Gold’’s oohs and ahhs (“Gimme that gold, gimme that fire!”). In ‘Chicago’, the shivering of strings evokes themes of classic horror as an cinematic quality is bestowed (“An apparition lifts me up, from its shoulders I sit and see your face above the treeline / Your reassurances subtitled in American English, I am calm as we sail down the hillside.”). Bass descends slowly like a dark, thunderous cloud; the beat of percussion skips and thrums forward, caught somewhere between a club night and a nightmare. Of course, this is an album for the 2020s, and its manic injections of imagery and hyperbole feel more than well aware of this. For example, ‘Hard Drive Gold’ spirals into the haze of a cryptocurrency god complex, its teenage protagonist fantasising about becoming a bitcoin millionaire. In an interview with Varsity, the band explains: ‘It felt like this modern morality tale about, you know, money […] In a way, it shows the ultimate meaningless of money. That money now is really just numbers on a screen.’ The real and the surreal are not always so far away, as we are so happily reminded.

There are points where the constant repetition of melody loses its appeal. The instrumentals of ‘Walk a Mile’, while pleasing to listen to, fail to live up to the climaxes of their predecessor ‘Philadelphia’, or the short and sweet elegy of ‘Delta’ that comes after, which gently blends the epic with the serene (“Force fields in the delta: I’m not a praying man but I’ll kneel to that”). At this point, The Dream seems to lose momentum, albeit briefly, and runs the risk of snapping its listener out of the trance it seems so deftly to have put them into.

“However, it seems that in the madness of 2022, The Dream goes beyond the familiar yet vague label of ‘experimental’ to artfully transcend the barriers of an unconscious mind”

In contrast, the album’s strongest points emerge in the way it constantly twists and turns, layering electric guitar upon sharp percussion upon hazy synthesisers in a sleepy cohesion. While the bagpipe-esque synth and shanty-like choral lines in ‘Bane’ drag the listener into a state of hallucination, ‘Powders’ pulls them out of it, the ebb and flow of waves growing louder over blues-y chord progressions: ethereal California rock meets a stilted monologue that comes right out of a John Hughes movie. The richness of The Dream lies in its small indulgences of these excesses, coming and going like the tide.

The Dream is a fundamentally modern album. For those familiar with the band, there is a certain sound that distinguishes their records from their contemporaries in the electronic indie scene, even to the extent of parody. However, it seems that in the madness of 2022, The Dream goes beyond the familiar yet vague label of ‘experimental’ to artfully transcend the barriers of an unconscious mind – for both its creators and its listeners.

In listening to The Dream, it begins to feel as though one is never quite awake, yet never quite asleep. What remains is an audial unreality, carbonated with the fizzed-up cataclysm impermanence, where, as I painfully bring myself to quote Rousseau, “everything is absurd, but nothing is shocking”. It is a journey through an unnervingly bizarre imagination, and stemming from a reality that is just as inexplicable. Dreaming, then, sure – but lucidly so.