Fredericton weirdo-rippers Motherhood have returned with Thunder Perfect Mind, the trio's fifth and most cohesive album yet. Inspired by singer/guitarist Brydon Crain's daily walks across the New Brunswick capital's Westmorland Bridge, the album traces the odyssey of a protagonist who gets abducted by the Cloud; a black, formless, extraterrestrial force that spreads across the entire sky. Inside the continually growing Cloud, time moves at a different speed. Hurled back to the dawn of time, the protagonist bears witness to the unfolding of history. He roams this inscrutable dimension for millions of years in solitude before he finally discovers a way out.
Thunder Perfect Mind is Motherhood at their most dialed in. With co-production by Kyle Cunjak and mixing by Deerhoof's Greg Saunier, Brydon, bassist/keyboardist Penny Stevens and drummer Adam Sipkema sound bolder than ever. The album's 10 songs brim with vitality. That said, Thunder Perfect Mind is still chaotic, but it's a controlled chaos as the band surfs between hard-hitting and playful mutant garage rock. "Bok Globule" is a cowpunk freakout, while Stevens' vibrant keys pierce through the sludgy "Propeller," a psychedelic deluge that calls to mind juggernauts like TEKE::TEKE and the now-defunct Kikagaku Moyo.
Stevens' vocals have always been one of Motherhood's highlights, whether she's singing backup like on Thunder Perfect Mind's "Grow High" or lead on the cauterized follow-up track "Grow Higher," a 49-second hardcore blowout. This pair of songs continues the band's penchant for two-parters, or at least callbacks, such as "Crawly" and "Crawly II" from 2022's Winded. That album also featured "Flood," whereas Thunder Perfect Mind opens with "Flood II," a stalking track on which the protagonist witnesses a man jump off a bridge. The man clutches the rail on his way down, but the image and questions about his circumstances haunt the protagonist for days.
More than just a quirky, bizarre tale for the sake of being fun and weird, Thunder Perfect Mind reflects the anxieties and uncertainties of living in a world on the tipping point of a techno-climate disaster from which there's no return. Maybe that's why the image of the bridge-jumper lives rent free in the protagonist's mind — we've all gone over the edge and are hanging by our fingertips from the same metaphorical bridge.