Despite that, and perhaps because of my comically low expectations, Air for Free surprised me. It’s a true follow-up to their 2009 record Forget and Not Slow Down, which was a post-breakup album of the first order. If Forget was a record about letting go, Air for Free is a record about growing up. I haven’t stopped playing it all week.

Stylistically, Air for Free is similar to Forget — poppy tunes that have little to do with the band’s punk origins abound. But the songwriting is as good as it’s ever been, and there are hints of that ska formula left over that remain a ton of fun. “Elephant Parade” has some of the horns ska was known for during its chorus.

Songs like “Mrs. Hippopotamuses’” have that classic Relient K vibe to them too — along with the sense of humour and melodrama that the band is so well known for. “Cat” carries on that tradition as well. And on “Mountaintop,” the band feels like they’ve found their creative mojo again, with the whole band in perfect skip-step form.

As usual, though, the meatiest tracks on Air for Free are the ones where singer Matt Thiessen becomes more introspective. “Man” sounds like the theme song on the record, in which he ruminates on his past mistakes and poor life choices and sings in the chorus that “it’s time to be man.” It carries both nostalgia and the pangs of facing adulthood.

On “God” and “Prodigal,” which both sound U2-inspired, Thiessen admits to his belief in God and his struggles with his faith. They almost bookend each other on the record and, for fans, I suspect they’ll be among the album’s high points. When Thiessen sings, “I am the champion of wine; You’re the bread on my tongue. I am the last one in line — the prodigal son,” it feels like the culmination of everything the band has been struggling to say for over ten years.

If the album has any weak point, it’s that too much of it sounds canned in the studio. “Empty House,” which relies on autotune, is a black eye on the record; Thiessen can sing and it’s disappointing when his voice is relegated to the side for the sake of a poorly-used effect.

Yet those moments are few and far between. By and large, Relient K’s eighth album feels like an oddly self-aware and cogent album for a band that’s been around as long as they have. For the first time since the band was putting out joke-heavy Christmas records in 2007, it feels like Relient K is having fun again. And it’s been too long.

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On Half Free, Remy’s first release on the 4AD label, she sings about suicide, father/daughter relationships, broken homes, failing marriages, and disparaging family members (in no particular order). The album’s title becomes particularly ironic, quickly, as Remy jokes on the phone in a spoken interlude about how she’s glad she wasn’t “one of those sons that turns into a fascist dictator” but instead just “another woman with no self-esteem.”

While the album doesn’t necessarily come off as political, its comments about womanhood and family are particularly timely — and extremely liberal. As Remy struggles with finding her place, she speaks for women everywhere on the way.

That’s not to say that the record is entirely depressing: musically, it has a consistent, jangly bounce to it. Damn That Valley and Sed Knife are great examples of the sort of thing I suspect U.S. Girls will become famous for: beautiful alt-pop with venomous undertones.

What Half Free really reminds me of is Gone Girl, the 2014 David Fincher movie, or even Best Picture winner American Beauty. Thematically, both similarly examine the home life dream that has come to symbolize so much of the hope people find in North America’s suburbs. And both find the dream to be left wanting, revealing that beneath that facade, the dream is becoming a nightmare of broken homes and disrupted families.

The difference between them is that with U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy is revealing the brokenness from a place of intimacy. While Gone Girl and Beauty can be shocking, Half Free feels like a personal statement. In many ways, the album is more powerful as a result.

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The chorus in From Nowhere surprises me every time, with the guitar quickly getting caught in a loop in my head. Thinkin Aboutchu sounds dangerously like a song I’ve heard on the radio many times (can’t put my finger on which ones), but offers just enough of a twist to be quite clearly and cleverly different.

Some of the songs get a lot deeper than their initial surface value appears — check out Only Ghost, for example, which demonstrates both musical prowess and strong composition. They balance the pop songs quite well. I also love the title track and Home for similar reasons. This album is so fresh and optimistic that it’d be a shame to miss it.

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