LCD Soundsystem - American Dream [2LP]

Six years after saying goodbye at Madison Square Garden, LCD Soundsystem returned with American Dream, a 2017 album that sounds older, sadder and still built for the dancefloor, here across two 140-gram discs.

James Murphy had famously shut the project down in 2011 with a farewell show and a documentary to match. When the band regrouped, he only went ahead once the core members agreed to make a new record together, and the result became their first album to reach number one on the Billboard 200.

Murphy produced it himself, and it carries the weight of middle age, lost friends and a world gone strange. "Oh Baby" opens in a hazy synth glow closer to Suicide than to disco, while "Call the Police" builds into a rattling, cathartic rock song about a country coming apart. "Tonite" pokes fun at pop's obsession with youth over a relentless electronic pulse, and the closing "Black Screen" stretches past twelve minutes into a quiet farewell widely read as a tribute to David Bowie.

Across ten songs the grooves run long, the synths glow warm and the jokes cut deeper than before.

Few comeback albums earn their existence this convincingly, and on vinyl it plays like a late-night conversation with an old friend who still knows how to move a room.