A little less than two years on from 2016’s ‘Plum’, Californian scrap polymorphs Wand are prepared to announce their newest and fifth long playing record, ‘Laughing Matter’. By now, Wand is the shifting but unmistakable collaboration between Sofia Arreguin (keys, vocals), Cory Hanson (guitar, vocals), Robert Cody (guitar), Lee Landey (bass) and Evan Burrows (drums). ‘Laughing Matter’ is marked by the confidence and exuberance of a band that has lived, feuded, thrived and grown together through years of dedicated jamming, touring and recording, across Western and Eastern states, continents and mind-sets.

Largely recorded on the infamous southern border of broken, decadent America, ‘Laughing Matter’ belongs to the afterlife. With no major label funding, no management or lawyers, no corporate distribution, near zero social media presence and no commercial dealings whatsoever (with only poor, pitiful Drag City to help them carry the flag), Wand have toured the world a bajillion times in five years and made four varied and compelling records while accumulating a devoted following. There may be a future in rock music beyond slapping rote regurgitations onto a lifeless syntactic grid. Wand are proof you don’t have to be an industry toy to sell records – with devotion and time the seeds you plant with intention and care will grow back into the world.

Swerving between out-of-focus parable, travel diary, pep talk, polemic, love song, and lullaby, ‘Laughing Matter’ is a tough and tender album, its eyes on a lot of prizes. Where ‘Plum’ held the tension of its five band members getting on their feet, the songs on ‘Laughing Matter’ are concentrated and relaxed, even as they search for the right accusations to hurl at cynics and megalomaniacs.

The music is distilled and sculpted from an ash heap of collected improvisations, riven with audio-verite; the methods and instrumentation are traditional handmade rock ‘n’ roll. Yet the unorthodox arrangements of ‘Scarecrow’, the joyous embrace of pastiche and disruption on ‘Walkie Talkie’, the radical eclecticism of shapes and approaches on ‘Thin Air’, the ascendant choruses of ‘Wonder’ are all decidedly contemporary. This music is not revivalism or throwback; Wand are a precision instrument, a band that probes and teases style, genre, trope and anachronism into material, according to a law of motion that is aimed directly toward an uncertain future.

‘Laughing Matter’ is a record about love in a time of terror, about making the best use of the surveillance technology available today. It calls you down from panic room labyrinths, to work the deep tissue of unravelling trauma we all carry so dear. The 15 songs on this record face their energy outward, to take with you through a common world that can’t suffer its human abusers much longer. ‘Laughing Matter’ encourages you to shake hands with your old demons, to lay your pathologies to rest, to hold your spirit close and let your body do what’s next.