Few bands have misrepresented themselves quite as severely as when Cloakroom described themselves as “stoner emo.” Certainly, there was no way that they could have predicted the wave of bands like Mom Jeans (and nothing like Cloakroom) that would be described as “weed emo,” but even without that confusion, there’s not much emo about what they’ve ever done. They have borne a resemblance to a certain 90s alternative band out of Champagne-Urbana, but they’ve always been much closer to HUM than Braid.

But the stoner bit…that’s never been up for debate. Extracurriculars aside, their guitars have always carried the same sort of heft as stoner metal bands like Kyuss and Sleep. But Dissolution Wave sounds the most like what I could imagine wafting out of my older brother’s bedroom carried with wisps of sage-masked pot smoke—if I had an older brother, anyway.

According to the band, Dissolution Wave is a concept album (a “Space Western” they call it on their Bandcamp) about a world where all art and abstract thought has ceased to exist, wiped out by the “dissolution wave.” It depends on the world’s musicians to fill the gap, with only the best songs being filtered past the Spire and the Ward of Song, the judges of what is good and worthy of merit in this dystopic cosmology.

…or at least that’s what they say. There’s nothing in the lyrics to point to this sort of barren landscape. The front cover mentions that the songs escaped from “far beyond the Spire and Ward of Song,” but that’s the only clue the record itself gives. Rather, it seems that the imagined universe seemed more to inform the context in which they were writing the songs than the subject of those songs. Cloakroom wrote these songs as if the planet would stop spinning if they didn’t, as if they needed to be good enough to impress an apocalyptic authority in order for the songs to gain any sort of audience at all.

And you know what, it paid off. The imagined stakes resulted in the strongest collection of songs Cloakroom has ever released. The riffs are heavier, the melodies are smoother, and the drums are more punishing than they’ve ever been. At their core, the songs largely feel like sunshine pop, but played like they’re trying to shake the studio to the ground. Songs like “Lost Meaning” and “Dottie Black Thrush” juxtapose Doyle Martin’s lighter-than-air voice with guitars made of solid granite. Bobby Markos’ bass thunders beneath him, bouncing against the drumhead-breaking performance of new member Tim Remis. “Fear of Being Fixed” pays homage to Black Sabbath with a massive riff that borrows notes from other keys without concern of being seen as greedy, the airy vocal harmonies aloof to the sonic chaos on the ground below them.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Some moments are practically light. “A Force at Play” has shades of the Smiths in its jangling pop. “Lambspring” uses more reverb than distortion. “Doubts” is nearly a country song, complete with swung drums and a twangy guitar solo. The title track weaves the heavy and light together with great effect.

For a band that once described themselves as emo though, none of the songs feel imbued with much emotion (read: not saying that as a negative). Nothing is quite major or minor, joyful or mournful. Rather, there’s a zen that transcends the sonic extremes. Cloakroom isn’t expressing their emotions as much as they are escaping beyond them. It sometimes sounds as if they are trying to be so loud that they cease to exist beneath the noise. And looking back at the last two years that brought this record to life, dissolving from the fabric of reality doesn’t sound all that bad. And hey, Cloakroom already wrote the perfect soundtrack for it.