Zelienople don’t release much, but when they do you, can guarantee it’ll be special. It’s been four years since their last album, 2020’s Miasmah-released ‘Hold You Up, and since then the band have switched up their working method. Previously stationed in drummer Mike Weis’s basement-cum-studio, Zelienople’s regular sessions were interrupted when Weis relocated from Chicago to Kalamazoo, so they used to opportunity to sharpen their approach. Original collaborator PM Tummala is brought in for added synth, Rhodes and vibraphone, while Eric Eleazer plays synth and Rhodes. Tummala also handles the production on ‘Everything is Simple’, using his own studio for the recording and taking some of the pressure off Matt Christensen, who’s here allowed to concentrate solely on his vocals and dreamy guitar parts for the first time in years. Multi-instrumentalist Brian Harding, meanwhile, is the glue that binds, playing droning woodwind and bass to create that distinct Zelienople texture we know and love.

The atmosphere the band create on ‘Holy Rollers’ is familiar, but revitalised. Christensen’s vocals call out over evocative arhythmic drum rolls and doom-y, lower-register wails for a good three minutes before the track evaporates into placid ambience and then silence, re-appearing as a fully-formed, precisely engineered ensemble piece. The additional instrumentation shines, with vibraphone chimes and Rhodes piano fleshing out the trio’s established shimmer of ghostly jazz and caliginous blues, grazing their dreampop touchstones even deeper. Harding’s low-slung bassline on ‘Hold In My Hand’ anchors the track in Chicago history – we can hear vintage Tortoise in there somewhere, for sure – but Zelienople don’t make cinematic instrumentals, instead channeling their love of windswept pop, from Neil Young to Mark Hollis, into a smokier template. Not quite as murky or self-consciously dark as Bohren and the Club of Gore, Zelienople hit on a similar mood, but cross pollinate it with sounds from across the spectrum. On ‘In this Town Again’, the vibraphone cycles sound like Steve Reich or Ryuichi Sakamoto, underpinning Christensen’s distorted riffs, and on standout track ‘Wishing Wells’ the fizzing analogue synth and restrained, muted strums remind us of early Slowdive.

The extra instrumentation and production experimentation has helped the band fabricate a sound that’s both amorphous and strangely fixed. Different ideas and influences seep into each track – ‘Santa Chiaria’ is open-ended and beatless, the title track is galloping alt-country – but everything’s held together with a similar sense of weightlessness. It’d be wrong to label the music ambient, but Zelienople hit a similar tone, shrouding their compositions with gaseous instrumentation that lies somewhere between early Eno and Jon Hassell. It’s quite beautiful, too.