Act Surprised

Arriving a good 14 years after its predecessor, Sebadoh’s Defend Yourself, in 2013, was less a comeback than an act of closure, like one of those standalone reunion specials that follow the demise of a beloved long-running TV series. Where much of the indie-rock icons’ celebrated 1990s catalog invited us to eavesdrop on Lou Barlow’s roller-coaster romance with his main muse (girlfriend-turned-wife Kathleen Billus), his contributions to Defend Yourself updated their relationship status one last time with a striking degree of finality. “Someone else has found her way into my soul,” he sang at the top of album opener “I Will”: “Things have changed, no longer need to be with you.” Even if you were a casual listener with little knowledge of Barlow’s personal life, the line still stung, because it also summed up the average Sebadoh fan’s relationship with the band at the end of the ’90s.

The trio’s 1999 major-label debut, The Sebadoh, didn’t just fail to expand its audience, it was a dealbreaker for many longtime fans in an era when making an elaborately produced crossover record was enough to get even the most acclaimed indie-rock band cancelled. While Defend Yourself saw Barlow singing once again with the sort of characteristic candor that inspires tribute songs from veteran emo bands, musically it felt a little shell-shocked, as if memories of The Sebadoh’s Icarian leap inspired a reactionary retreat into a mid-tempo ’90s-indie comfort zone. But on their first album in six years, Sebadoh sound like a band free of baggage, whether personal or professional. Now they just have our raging shit-show of a world to worry about.

Act Surprised assumes the familiar form of Sebadoh’s mid-’90s Sub Pop classics, with Barlow and his habitual foil Jason Loewenstein evenly splitting the songwriting, while accommodating a lone wild-card contribution from the drummer (currently Bob D’Amico, formerly of the Fiery Furnaces). Instead of merely contrasting the tunefully heartfelt Barlow with the more erratic, irascible Loewenstein, the new album finds them mining common topical terrain—namely, the emotional toll of perpetually wading in a sea of misinformation—through their respective personalities.

As they take stock of a polarized culture, Sebadoh are unafraid to wade into gray areas. The deceptively chiming “Medicate” is Barlow’s contribution to the growing dialogue surrounding mental health, but it’s more than just an admission of addiction—when he sings, “Oh, I miss it when the sorrow tempts me again,” he’s questioning whether it’s actually better to feel pain than being drugged into feeling nothing at all. Loewenstein, meanwhile, uses the twitchy “Phantom” and twangy “Raging River” to parrot the sort of paranoia endemic to conspiracy-theorist culture. But he’s not just making a turkey shoot of easy targets—as an admitted enthusiast of UFO cover-ups on the early internet, he’s imagining the kind of tinfoil-hatted wingnut he could’ve turned into had he continued to slip deeper down the dark-web rabbit hole.

To channel our fraught current condition, Sebadoh eagerly reclaim their license to confuse by emphasizing a quality that was far less perceptible on Defend Yourself: their inherent volatility. Though often hailed as lo-fi folk heroes who taught indie rockers how to get in touch with their feelings, Sebadoh were also weirdo hardcore kids raised on Minutemen and Meat Puppets, and those eccentric influences are given more room to run wild here. Barlow’s “Celebrate the Void” may begin as a sluggish anthem of indecision, but it abruptly shifts gears into an exhilarating motorik free fall, while Loewenstein’s “Follow the Breath” finds a common language between needling math-punk guitars and arena-toppling Keith Moon drum rolls.

That sort of inspired energy proves tough to sustain over Act Surprised’s 45-minute run, particularly when the album veers into more temperate 1980s college-rock territory (“Vacation,” “Act Surprised”). But the album’s stellar closing trifecta—comprising the winsome power-pop of “Belief,” the adrenalized, Feelies-esque duet “Leap Year,” and the equally odd and elegiac “Reykjavik”—confirms Act Surprised’s status as the strongest Sebadoh release since 1996’s Harmacy. In a recent podcast interview, Barlow quipped that, extended hiatuses notwithstanding, Sebadoh “will never break up,” and on “Sunshine,” he spells out his recipe for endurance: “I need sunshine/To ignore/I need a room with heavy curtains, double lock up on the door.” With the way the world is heading, the future promises plenty more reason to curl up in the dark.