Deeper: Careful! CS

You can't get Deeper if you're standing still. That's intentional, says the Chicago quartet's Nic Gohl. "Does it feel good when you're listening to this song? Does your body want to move with it?" These are the questions he asked himself as he and bandmates Shiraz Bhatti, Drew McBride, and Kevin Fairbairn were writing and recording Careful!, their third record and Sub Pop debut. "I wanted these to be interesting songs, but in a way where a two-year-old would vibe out to it," Gohl adds. "It's pop music, basically."

That "basically" qualifier is working pretty hard, as fans of 2020's Auto-Pain might suppose. Auto-Pain was an album of thick brutalist architecture, full of straight lines and sharp angles, making hard shapes strong enough to carry a heavy thematic burden. On Careful!, they're reshaping the facades and splashing color, not reimagining their sound so much as testing its limits. There are synth experiments, there are moments of nauseatingly powerful darkwave and coldbeat. There are massive rock'n'roll songs that you can imagine 10,000 people singing along to in some beautiful outdoor setting. There is a remarkably moving love song. Is there pop? There's some pop, yes, a wiry bit of Cars-esque neon called "Everynight." Look around the right corners, and you might see some of the old buildings peeking through, too, but in this context – on a song like "Sub," say, a song that began life as a slow and dark prog jam but is now an elegantly cresting wave of post-punk – they feel more sophisticated, lit up in the cold, bright glow of Television.

The album's title, exclamation point, and all come from the song "Airplane Air," and it's echoed in the album's final song, "Pressure," a song Gohl wrote for his wife and longtime partner. "Be safe," he sings, "I will need you around." It's a song that sounds like nothing else in their catalog – ringing harmonics, chiming chords, vocal harmonies – but the sense of interdependence is near the center of Deeper's music, from the way Gohl and McBride's guitars jigsaw together and interlock with Bhatti's drum patterns and Fairbairn's bass to the lyrical vulnerability at the album's core. That sense of mutuality makes this restlessly curious, stylistically broad album feel like the most coherent portrait of who Deeper is. Or, as McBride ultimately frames it, "Careful! is about looking out for one another."