Ow ∞ is a trust fall. It’s yes, and – . It exists in spite of – it’s messy and hellish and free, a scotch-tape collage of memories, ephemera, Y2K-era burned CDs and backseat makeouts. It’s an invitation to the party, one riddled with ecstatic joy and failures and second / third / fourth adolescences, cities under water or on fire, our dystopian present and past and future, arms wide open to meet it, to embrace and absorb the Pain, in all its forms, vomited out into something strange and new.

On their new album, Sylvan Esso metabolizes a life of making music with people into making art that you just love, a tactile and enveloping freefall. Across their life as a band, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn have made songs from a tightrope, a central tension at the core of their songwriting from which everything else spiraled, a push-and-pull of the physical and existential, a dance floor to a dark corner, cerebral and instinctual – and here, finally, unleashed into something that is free.

Written across four years in the woods in Chapel Hill, the longest the band has ever spent writing a record, Ow ∞ arrives with an intense immediacy. Most of the tracks here are Meath’s first vocal takes, and the clarity and humanness of her singular voice anchors the album in something real. It was born from a time of experimentation and collaboration, resulting in a sinewy, punchy, explosive work where the songs want to claw their way out. A technicolor totem of personal destruction, the feeling of being pummeled to silly putty and built back into something that feels almost human, almost familiar but freakish and new – a cartoonish, slapstick grin printed across a ruin. Ow ∞ marks the first time Sylvan Esso has gotten comfortable with the fact that they are doing this – where they’ve figured out all the avenues in which they can take control, and put things out the way they want to, with the people they choose, in their own studio and through their own label. For an album that wrestles so much with the out-of-control nature of being alive, it meets the duo at a time where, finally, they actually have complete control over what Sylvan Esso can be.

Across the album is the spirit of chaos – for example, Ow ∞ features six different drummers in total in TJ Maiani, Joe Westerlund, Glenn Kotche, Jake Luppen, Jenn Wasner, and Sanborn himself, with some tracks featuring several different drum tracks mixed together at once. A large chunk of the record was born from improvisation, hours spent at Betty’s finding grooves with percussionist TJ Maiani, bassist Daniel Aged, and Sanborn on synths, Meath trying out vocals over it. They made 5-10 songs a day, filling a hard drive with ideas – some of it stuck, like the earlier-released standalone single “KEEP ON,” or Ow ∞’s “Right to Left,” but some of it was just a seedling for other songs – like the hypnotic “On and On,” which wrote itself nearly immediately after the band dipped back into the file with trusted collaborators Jenn Wasner and and Jake Luppen. James Mapley-Brittle of GRRL, a prolific producer and musician with whom Sanborn has collaborated over the years, also played a pivotal role in the album, acting as the glue to hold so many disparate ideas together – each day in the studio he discovered something new, blowing up tracks and then abandoning that work, a constant and restless reimagining. There’s remnants of a ghost band across this record – nothing was sacred, which made it more fun.

“One of my favorite ways of producing in general is to come up with an idea and then take out a third of it,” Meath explains. “One, it makes things interesting and exciting, but also it makes your ear ask a question. And it kind of forces the listener to be creative as well. To try to fill that space with something, which I find as a listener to be really exciting and interesting. Particularly with pop music, because it's all about fulfilling a promise. You know this melodic structure, you know, we're going to the four here. Like, not doing it is always the thing that makes people fall in love with a song or a person.”

Like renting an apartment that’s been rented over and over again for decades, taking a knife and slicing through the Landlord Special to excavate the paint and wallpaper underneath – the key here was choosing how deep to go, what to keep and what to peel away. Ow ∞ is covered in something like patina, or jpeg artifacts, tree rings of bands and versions of the songs excavated and built into an ornate uncanny valley architecture.

On album opener, “Entertainment & Coca-Cola,” a peculiar anthem and fitting introduction to the new world Sylvan Esso inhabits. Meath’s voice is pitched down, awash in blue and dive bar lights, the violence and commerce of the American dream, buoyed by a chorus of North Carolina crickets captured on an iPhone voice memo when Meath first wrote the song. But we zoom out in other parts – the raucousness of “Sledge,” the meandering ennui of “Flood Season,” the medieval-skewing “Plastic Sword,” we’re faced with the angel of death – a sort of biblical sprawling backdrop of destruction, but they make just as much sense with the songs that feel personal. The punchy, punked up summer anthem of “Hot Slob,” or the Sigur Rós sample on “Concrete Glen,” a band that soundtracked a lot of Meath’s childhood kissing. Or the undulating “Jessica,” which feels akin to being submerged in water, eyes open, blinking through the pain to see what lies beneath.

“I guess what I can say is that living hurts forever, and then it stops,” Meath says. “But also it’s a little silly. And that’s how I feel. If you’re going to keep participating in the world, and in your life, you have to commit to being hurt. And if you aren't putting yourself in the way of potential hurt, you miss out on a lot of potential opportunities. So in some ways it’s like a rallying cry, saying ‘I’m gonna get hurt forever, and that’s okay.’”