Ow ∞ is a trust fall. It’s yes, and – . It exists in spite of – it’s messy and hellish and free, a scotch-tape collage of memories, ephemera, Y2K-era burned CDs and backseat makeouts. It’s an invitation to the party, one riddled with ecstatic joy and failures and second / third / fourth adolescences, cities under water or on fire, our dystopian present and past and future, arms wide open to meet it, to embrace and absorb the Pain, in all its forms, vomited out into something strange and new.

On their new album, Sylvan Esso metabolizes a life of making music with people into making art that you just love, a tactile and enveloping freefall. Across their life as a band Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn have made songs from a tightrope, a central tension at the core of their songwriting from which everything else spiraled, a push-and-pull of the physical and existential, a dance floor to a dark corner, cerebral and instinctual – and here, finally, unleashed into something that is free.

Written across four years in the woods in Chapel Hill, the longest the band has ever spent writing a record, Ow ∞ arrives with an intense immediacy. Most of the tracks here are Meath’s first vocal takes, and the clarity and humanness of her singular voice anchors the album in something real. It was born from a time of experimentation and collaboration, resulting in a sinewy, punchy, explosive work where the songs want to claw their way out. A technicolor totem of personal destruction, the feeling of being pummeled to silly putty and built back into something that feels almost human, almost familiar but freakish and new – a cartoonish, slapstick grin printed across a ruin.

Ow ∞ marks the first time Sylvan Esso has gotten comfortable with the fact that they are doing this – where they’ve figured out all the avenues in which they can take control, and put things out the way they want to, with the people they choose, in their own studio and through their own label. For an album that wrestles so much with the out-of-control nature of being alive, it meets the duo at a time where, finally, they actually have complete control over what Sylvan Esso can be.