Jorden Dreyers, lead singer of La Dispute, is a bit of an enigma. He masquerades as a hardcore frontman, thrashing across the stage as he screams his lungs out.

In actuality, he’s a writer, through and through, showing more kinship with Ernest Hemingway than Henry Rollins.

And like a writer, he has a hopelessly strayed train of though—his synapses build connections between unrelated objects, deducting the lives of others out of seemingly insignificant details.

Wildlife showcased this sensibility across a number of conceptual short stories, each track examining every detail of its narrative like a forensic detective. Rooms of the House, on the other hand, takes the same speculative minutia and focuses it on a single event.

The album is centered around the end of a relationship and explores how that relationship tinted everything around it. A few images linger: a dinner party, road trips, a bridge collapsing, a woman reading quietly in the next room, and the objects that are still haunted by her memory.  Even childhood memories that are seemingly unrelated are tinted by the thought of his now-absent lover.

If Wildlife was a collection of short stories, Rooms of the House is a novella.

Musically, it’s also much more varied. Wildlife was an hour-long hardcore marathon, rarely stopping for breath. Rooms of the House is more agile. The songs are more dynamic, understanding that quietness can be just as powerful as screaming amplifiers.

There are even a few ballads, which end up being some of the strongest additions to La Dispute’s catalog. A couple times, Jordan even sorta sings. Just a couple lines though. And at a breezy 41 minutes, it’s easier to digest than their previous work.

In all, Rooms of the House is an incredibly sophisticated record—broadening the conventions of its genre without losing its grip on their signature sound. An incredible record that finally convinced me of the band’s legacy after years of dismissing them.