Spasmodic Austin supergroup MIEN — Alex Maas (The Black Angels), John Mark Lapham (The Earlies), Rishi Dhir (Elephant Stone), and Tom Furse (The Horrors) — return with the long-awaited follow-up to their eponymous 2018 debut. Borne of a chance meeting between Dhir and Maas at SXSW, MIEN have taken their collaborative approach to songwriting into bold new territory. Most of the album began as individual sketches from each member, later woven together by Lapham — the band’s self-styled “musical alchemist.”

Weaving such disparate threads together might sound like an odd way to build a cohesive record, but there’s plenty here to lasso the attention. First to bubble up from MIEN’s cosmic soup is ‘Evil People’ — all warped urgency and the kind of acid-drenched nonsense lyrics Syd Barrett once claimed for his own, delivered with the manic edge of Fuzz Club labelmates King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

‘Counterbalance’ lifts the hyper-processed sitar straight out of The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Private Psychedelic Reel’ before dissolving into drones and flexing a sinewy, tape-echoed groove — like Jagwar Ma after a heavy session on the kettlebells. ‘Mirror’ is arguably the most radio friendly track on the album — upbeat and buoyant, with Maas’ quivering vocal suspended over a lush blanket of keyboards and assorted blips.

That clarity of composition is a testament to the care poured into those scattered fragments. Indeed, you can feel the record evolving organically as it plays, stretching out into longer, deeper trips like ‘How Could You Run’ and ‘Knocking On Your Door’ — the latter all Motorik pulse, Kraut synths and enough ghostly voices to induce a latent paranoia. Possibly not one to throw on if you’re in the middle of a huge one.

‘Slipping Away’ finds the band in full widescreen, pushing the experiment to it’s maximal end — shamanistic drumming, Maas’ half-whispered mantras, humming with electric folk horror like a Black Mirror hallucination. The warmth of redemptive closer ‘Morning Echo’ sounds like the sunrise; assured and welcoming.

Seven years on from their inception, MIEN finally sound less like a side-project and more like the main event. And we should be very glad of that.