If that’s true, it’s only slightly true.

There are tracks throughout Life Without Sound that pummel as hard as anything in Cloud Nothings’ catalogue, with production quality that slays and unbridled aggression that captures much of what Cloud Nothings has become known for. Tracks like “Darkened Rings” or “Strange Year” carry much of the craziness of albums like Here and Nowhere Else.

In other words, this isn’t exactly the sort of record you’d want to meditate to.

That being said, there are new sounds on Life Without Sound. The band is more tuneful than ever before. The album opener, “Up to the Surface”, carries a piano in its intro and builds through a nearly pop-punk introduction. “Internal World” and “Enter Entirely” take their influence from bands like Weezer (and even some classic rock).

For Cloud Nothings, this is par for the course. Cloud Nothings’ trademark is our inability to know what an album is going to sound like upon release, and Life Without Sound is no different.

That’s not to say that Cloud Nothings is making music that sounds unlike themselves. They’re not making pop music, after all. But they’re embracing a method of songwriting that sounds less rushed and more tuneful. It’s a step in a new direction, but not necessarily a commercial one.

For the first time, Cloud Nothings just sounds optimistic.

Well, as optimistic as Cloud Nothings can sound.

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Throughout the album, that first impression never fades.

Mothers’ debut moves from one style to another, dabbling in the baroque folk on Too Small For Eyes, but also playing songs that sound more like Canadian musicians Rah Rah (like It Hurts Until It Doesn’t or album stand-out Copper Mines). There’s a swirl of building tension in each song, shifting tempos and shapes as every song morphs from its beginning to its (usually) cacophonous end (Hold Your Own Hand being a great example).

But the star of the show consistently remains Krstine Leschper, whose voice sounds at once fragile, powerful, acutely sharp, and terrifying all at once. She has a habit of nearly whispering into the microphones, hitting notes that force her voice to crack, or refusing to let a note hang long enough in the air before she lets the guitars swallow it alive. She falls apart on the microphone.

The resulting record isn’t for everybody. Blood-Letting isn’t a crowd-pleaser of a song, and I suspect many people will think Leschper’s voice has an odd, screechy quality. But I think the band knows this. The whole record is drowned in treble, forcing everything to sound wobbly.

For Mothers, that theme of sounding broken, or like it could break at any moment, is sort of the point. They play to their strengths throughout, writing remarkably consistent songs that never falter from the album’s core strength of self-loathing introspection.

When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired is a debut record that sounds like nobody else in the genre. With the exception of Lockjaw (which is a great track), it doesn’t go after the hook or groove of a singles-filled record, and it’s not terribly catchy. WYWALDYAT hits on an emotional level that few bands ever succeed with, especially not on their first try.

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What makes Girlpool so wonderful is their ability to sharply emote through their simplicity. Although their playing isn’t complicated — the most intricate guitar parts could be picked up quickly even by a newbie to the instrument — the album finds its power within that simplicity.

It takes a couple listens to notice, because it doesn’t feel completely strange, but Girlpool doesn’t have a drummer. Despite that, their songs still retain an impressive sense of aggression and vitality. While you could call the band folk, if you don’t at least label it as punk-inspired punk, you’re missing the most important part of their sound.

Punk, not unlike hip hop, has long given voices to the voiceless and the impoverished. That’s why, quite often, it feels as if some music is improperly classified as punk (or hip hop, for that matter). What matters with these genres isn’t so much the stringency of the instrumentation, but the performers themselves. In the case of Girlpool, it feels as if disenfranchised and confused twenty-first century women, often inexplicably removed from our cultural conversation, are being given voices. Girlpool are socially conscious, they’re mad, and they make great music. Not a bad combination.

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Now Hear In might sound noisy, but there’s a shouted melody to it that never descends into anything obnoxious. And yet the punk energy is there all the way throughout. Psychic Trauma isn’t just a bunch of guys smashing some drums and power chords, and while Pattern Walks ends up getting heavier than some listeners might feel comfortable with, it’s immediately followed up with the more radio-friendly I’m Not Part Of Me.

It’s hard to find a track I dislike, and while I might not be throwing this on at house parties like I did with Celebration Rock for a while, this is going to get some heavy rotation in the car with the window rolled down. I think my favourite track is Quieter Today.

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I Can’t Help You and Duke are great intros to this oddball record. That’s not to say the whole record is slow or apathetic; some of the later tracks introduce rock elements unheard in the first couple tracks. Check out Wild as an example.

When Cate really slows it down for the title track, there’s a whole different vibe of sadness going on. Throughout the record, you get the feeling that Le Bon isn’t pleased with the world around her. But by the end, you feel like maybe she thinks she’s the problem.

The album is existentialist wandering, as Cate drifts from one point of anxiety to another. It’s not political, and it’s hardly societal, but Cate is writing about the same dissatisfaction many of us go through: if everything is good, why are we so sad? What is it we’re missing? As a result, it’s a record that feels both distant and intimate, like Cate is holding up a mirror and also saying that we can’t possibly understand what her life is like.

She’s not despondent, though. She shouldn’t be: Mug Museum might be her strongest record yet.

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