Parquet Courts is a band looking for a direction. They’ve stumbled from sound to sound as they try new spins on their unique brand of in-your-face Brooklyn indie rock, straying as far as Bob Dylan ballads and New York roots punk.

Their latest LP “Human Performance” feels at times like just another step in this progression, but it is also the most cohesive and memorable to date. Parquet Courts has dropped their lo-fi undertone, instead adopting a more polished sound than anything heard from them before.

Points of the album hark back to a number of earlier points in their career, but with a newfound confidence brought on by their intensive touring in the past years. The brooding opening track “Dust” parallels the tense lead offs from their twin 2014 releases, and the nearly seven-minute “One Man, No City” recalls long ballads like “Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth” and “She’s Rolling.”

As attractive as these new spins on old sounds are, Parquet Courts really shine when continuing to break new musical ground. Singles “Outside” and “Berlin Got Blurry” are microcosms of the band’s new musical footing, melding their raw and “anti-reverb” sound with post-punk melody. It is an unexpected turn for the group, but one that they have synthesized perfectly into their sound’s trajectory.

By far the most noticeable change during the new album is a brand new lyrical direction. Parquet Courts rose from Brooklyn obscurity with “Light Up Gold” in 2012, pushing a subtly tense sound and detached lyricism that music publications proclaimed as slacker rock. The band has been working to shake that label with each subsequent release, and the newfound emotional openness of “Human Performance” may be the final jolt out of the heavy-lidded image that has defined them in the past.

Parquet Courts’ themes of modern isolation from “Content Nausea” are replaced by a more internal perspective. The album is a clear view into urban life in New York, applying the outsider’s sound of their past lyrics to a spoke-sung side rooted deep inside the social world of Brooklyn and Queens. Lead singer Andrew Savage drawls on “Berlin Got Blurry” that “feels so effortless to be a stranger/but feeling foreign’s such a lonely habit,” and the lyric encapsulates the excluded intimacy that “Human Performance” captures more clearly than any album in recent memory.

The perennial progression of their sound doesn’t exclude low points. “I Was Just Here” is an exercise in experimental guitar sounds, a fruitless one that the band had already explored—and exhausted—in “Monastic Living”, the near-wordless album in which intrigue was matched only by disappointment. Parquet Courts flirts with noise on dozens of tracks, but when they bring it into the focus like on “I Was Just Here”, their vision far exceeds their competence. Similarly, the quiet “Stead On My Mind” reflects less of modern rock trailblazing we can expect from the band and more of a halfhearted Velvet Underground cover band; Parquet Courts shine when they are moving through new territory, not trying out others’.

Also returning on the new album is Parquet Courts’ very direct social commentary. The topics and approach have changed along with the album’s themes, moving from the abstract to the current and direct. The commentary peaks in later track “Two Dead Cops,” as rapid instrumentals crescendo and Savage fills the song with a staccato bark: “nobody cries in the ghetto for two dead cops.”

The Bottom Line: “Human Performance” is a a rough but remarkably encompassing view of Parquet Courts from the inside. Regardless of whether they refine the album’s ideas or continue marching through new musical territory, the group has certainly found something special.

4.5/5 paws