Parquet Courts – Human Performance

After last year’s wilfully difficult Monastic Living EP, you’d be forgiven for expecting Parquet Courts’ latest full-length album to take a similarly off-the-wall approach to melody and structure. Hold those horses, because the NYC four-piece might have just made their most cut-and-dried record yet.

It turns out – when you strip away the fuzzy, stoner-psych walls of the band circa 2012's Light Up Gold, and put the hedonistic blather of their Sunbathing Animal incarnation on ice – you’re left with infectious, sparse and clarified rock songs. Desert-dry lyrics and dust-bowl guitar lines turn Human Performance into a character-study of washed-out, boozed-up self-awareness.

"“My eyes feel like / Cigarette burns / I’ll brush my teeth / That's good for me," deadpans frontman Andrew Savage on I Was Just Here. And there we have it; this summer's anthem for every blinding festival comedown. Human Performance might have sacrificed the band's rickety immediacy, but they compensate with wise, grass-stalk chewing authority and grubby, plentiful hooks. [Katie Hawthorne]