Giving this album its first listen, my roommate looked at me perplexed and asked, “When did Brand New become These Arms are Snakes?” It’s a valid question—Brand New’s first two albums spend so much time putting LiveJournal-worthy insults and teen-movie drama to pop punk, and the music itself gives almost no hints as to what happened between Deja Entendu and The Devil and God to get Jesse Lacey to forget about his beef with Taking Back Sunday and focus inward and upward. But after the somber theology of The Devil and God, Daisy is not a surprise at all.

The album starts with a sample of an old recording of a woman accompanied by a solo piano—it could very well be from a church service—and in the middle of a piano phrase launches into Vices, the hardest, heaviest, and screamingest song Brand New has ever put to tape. Lacey’s new screaming sounds a bit like Glassjaw’s Darryl Palumbo, and the guitar solo in the middle of the song sounds like it was stolen from the Space Ghost Coast to Coast theme song (note: those are both excellent things). Despite leading into a song evocative of The Devil and God’s midtempo Jesus, the new hardness appears elsewhere on the album, to similarly great effect. And the melancholy, midtempo numbers are much more frequent here, they are much more than rehashes of Jesus, refining the format on each reappearance, being paired with slide guitars, synthesizers, and fuzzed out pickups.

Lacey may not be as singularly focused here as on the monomania of The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, but the mood is just as dark—darker in fact, as the hope of God at least being around for him to destroy himself isn’t as present. That’s not to say the songs make any sense at all—they don’t, really. They’re just surreal, self-doubting ramblings, and that is precisely why they’re so effective as they are howled over the churning distortion or whispered over the moody palm mutes of the guitars. And this is the primary distinction between Daisy and its predecessor—The Devil and God’s darkness came from the chilling clarity of the questions it asked, while Daisy’s comes from the subconscious and primeval fear its abstractness evokes.