The gap between Sunset Rubdown's last record, 2009's Dragonslayer, and this year's Always Happy to Explode is three times longer than the band's original five-year, three-album run.
While reunions are increasingly commonplace — heck, it's the second Spencer Krug band to reunite, after Wolf Parade — Sunset Rubdown never really seemed like the returning type. Having quietly dissolved at the end of a tour, they seemed content with such an ending. But after waking from a dream in which they'd reunited, Krug reached out to his former bandmates — multi-instrumentalists Camilla Wynne, Michael Doerksen and Jordan Robson-Cramer — who agreed to go on tour, adding bassist Nicholas Merz as they went. Doing shows proved a joyful enough experience to warrant an album.
And so 15 years on, Sunset Rubdown picks up where its previous run of cryptic indie epics left off. Of course, Krug's dulcet croon is unmistakable, and the instrumental palette is familiar — textured synths driving melodic sagas; dramatic instrumentals and inscrutable imagery.
But the intentions feel different here, partly due to creative circumstance: Doerksen couldn't make the album sessions, meaning electric guitar is largely absent here. This puts Sunset Rubdown in somewhat altered territory, but the result is that Always Happy to Explode feels like a slightly paired-down, somewhat-more-raw version of the band. It's strange yet familiar; like the dream that brought them back together, Always Happy's nine songs are enigmatically compelling.
The muted strums of opener "Losing Light" play like a haunted house creaking to life, with a descending bassline and uncertain keyboard notes matching lyrics like "And Hyden lost his mind the first time he heard the muse / But he could never bring himself to cry."
Elsewhere, "Candles" puts a buoyant synth bounce to good use, while "Reappearing Rat" finds cheerful menace in an unrelenting drum push. "Cliché Town" feels like the album's centrepiece, built out of circular, rising piano notes, spaced-out guitar, and a midpoint rhythm shift. Closer "Fable Killer" ends the album on a gorgeous note, paired back to just piano and Krug's voice.
Reunions, for obvious reasons, tend to dwell in the past. Sunset Rubdown's certainly pulls from its own history, but it's more than just nostalgia: these are familiar sounds finding new configurations. For however long this reunion lasts, it's a welcome one.