For the longest time, I wrote La Dispute off as a mewithoutYou ripoff band. Who else was mixing hardcore poetry with spoken word (shouted word?) poetry?

It was only after hearing the subdued, almost jazzy “Woman (reading)” off of 2014’s Rooms of the House that I gave them any real attention at all.

And while that album had moments that lived in that same sparse space,  it spent most of its time in a passionate, throat-ripping hardcore. Panorama on the other hand, stretches their softer side into a full album—and I couldn’t be happier.

Electronic atmospheres weave in and out of the album, segueing between tracks. The band rolls through ruminative riffs, only occasionally bursting into punk catharsis. The drums and bass groove much more often than they rock. The guitars vibe more than they drive.

“Rhodonite and Grief” rides a skittering beat, its atmosphere built around jazz chords and a mournful trumpet. “View From Our Bedroom Window” augments intertwining guitar lines with chiming synths. “In Northern Michigan” is a lesson in sparseness, ambient guitars selling behind a minimalist bass line.

Which isn’t to say there’s no rawness here. “Fulton Street II” bursts with heavy chords and a driving drumbeat. “Anxiety Panorama” crashes with punk restlessness. “Footsteps At The Pond” stabs its chords with urgency. Though it’s telling that all of these tracks are punctuated by quieter interludes.

And against this interplay, lead vocalist Jordan Dreyer meditates on life, death, and suffering. Much of the album finds him wrestling with the insignificance of his own struggling. He lifts up a litany of images: a dead body found at a rest stop, the ghost of a lover’s memory wandering aimlessly across city streets, the surrender of his grandmother to dementia, long nighttime drives going nowhere in particular. (Coincidentally, a list of things mentioned in a La Dispute song sounds itself like a La Dispute song).

For much of the album, he speaks in hushed tones, almost whispering beneath the band. He shouts only occasionally, when his plaintive meditations overwhelm his capacity for restraint.

La Dispute has always been known for their catharsis, but Panorama flips the script. Instead of releasing emotion, here they marinate in them. It swells and churns, but rarely bursts. Even Jordan’s final screams of, “I can be everything you need!” fade and give way to a few more moments of the band’s subdued groove.

It’s a different game for the group. In ways, it almost plays like an “unplugged” album (the same way The Mars Volta called “Octahedron” an unplugged record). It’s stripped of the band’s usual tricks, stretching themselves outside of their comfort zone. But in the end, it might be their best record yet.