Zonoscope

Cut Copy are Australian, and it’s summer in Australia right now. So if it feels a little weird listening to an album of euphoric, starry-eyed dance-rock on earbuds while you’re scraping snow-grit off your windshield, keep in mind: Somewhere in the world, someone is probably road-tripping to a swimming hole with this album playing, or eating a popsicle, or playing catch with their dogs while it blasts out of a car stereo or nearby boombox. By the time summer arrives for those of us in the northern hemisphere, we’ll know these songs by heart and be able to sing along loudly.

Back when this group released 2004’s Bright Like Neon Love, the idea of backing dazed, introverted indie pop with a utopian house thump was still relatively novel. And though that sound has since inspired legions of followers and copycats, still no one does it quite like Cut Copy themselves. 2008’s steamrolling In Ghost Colours was an album of anthems; tracks like “Hearts on Fire” and “Lights and Music” were transcendent pop that stuck in heads for days. But Zonoscope is something different. It’s an album-album that puts serious work into movements and transitions, and it works best when you hear it all in one chunk. That doesn’t mean it’s Cut Copy’s OK Computer; it just means that the group has put more work into building a vast, rolling landscape rather than a series of peaks.

Zonoscope opens with a blast of woozy ecstasy in the form of “Need You Now”, the sort of track where you don’t even realize how much tension the group has built up until they release it, and ends with “Sun God”, a marathon 15-minute groove that slowly morphs into a tranced-out Giorgio Moroder thud.