The Thousands

Love of Diagrams’ third album gives more away of the band personally than we’ve heard before at the same time as burying their new, intimate sleights invirtuosic geyser-blasts of instrumental anaesthetics. This most beloved of Melbourne groups speak memories of cornerstone rock-reflective feelings – euphoric meltdown, blurred recognition, bottled emotions bursting as melody and time-warping, repetitive rhythms – of being literally ‘Nowhere Forever’; caught in a mirrored room of tremolo and scourging self-knowing effacement; close as possible to wall-of-sound heaven.

Fans will be struck by a new breathiness in the group and a general move away from signature detached arrangements towards something more ‘expressive’ in general. Closing tracks ‘All You Know’ and ‘Its Professional’ are more directly gutting than anything we’ve heard from LOD before – their tight-to-snapping guitar lines and abstruse lyricism loosed to let in touches of Spiritualised – and ‘OnThe Breeze’ breaks into new, incredible Teenage Fanclub-on-psych-drugs territory. This is a wildly accomplished, generation-sealing record.