Dissolution Wave

The Indiana shoegazers' third long-player, Dissolution Wave undulates like a deep space radio emission, reaching out amongst the graveyard of stars in search of a ping. Billed as a sci-fi concept album about rebuilding the world after an artistic extinction event, the eight-song set feels both taut and expansive, adding a few new sludgy paths to the sonic landscaping of its predecessor, 2017's excellent, if overlong, Time Well. The narrative, which follows an asteroid miner who spends his evenings penning songs, is mostly impenetrable. Still, the band provides plenty of aural exclamation points along the way to support vocalist/guitarist Doyle Martin's evocative lyrics. Opener "Lost Meaning" sets the bar high, pairing crushing heaviness with airy melodic shifts that elicit the vastness and loneliness of the cosmos. That sense of incorporeal dread continues on the billowy title cut, which leans hard into the band's classic British shoegaze tendencies. Similarly, "A Force at Play" combin