If 2017’s Dirty Projectors was the band’s dark night of the soul, Lamp Lit Prose marks a vibrant rebirth. Bright, colourful, and bursting with hope, the music here splits the difference between pop instinct and avant-garde ambition, live-band rigour and super-synthetic production—think Talking Heads for the 2000s. And where lead Projector Dave Longstreth’s songs have, in the past, tended toward high concepts, here he dwells on the rush of simple things: optimism (“Right Now”), romance (“Break-Thru”) and pure, unfiltered excitement (“I Feel Energy”). It features assists from Rostam, Amber Mark, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold and HAIM.