“Firehead” initiates with dithering trills that sound a little like something Tchaikovsky would’ve inserted into a Nutcracker movement. Sharing more in common with the ballet’s “Coda” than shoegaze, the introduction to Infinity Girl’s new single is all you really need to hear to know that their forthcoming record, Harm, will demand all of your attention if you want to fully appreciate its intricacies, but if not, that’s OK too. “Firehead” is a lush, emotive piece of work on its own, but anyone who genuinely loves picking the little pieces out of a song and drawing parallels to the historical canon will revel in its complexity. This is a new approach for the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Boston band, whose earlier work (2012’s Just Like Lovers EP and the Stop Being On My Side full-length) harbored a certifiably dreamy aesthetic. If “Firehead” is any indication, Harm will sound like an awakening of sorts. Infinity Girl’s Nolan Eley told us the following about the single:

I wrote this song shortly after moving to New York. It’s a pretty clear departure from our previous releases — we kind of wanted to shake off the mountains of reverb and delay just feeling less and less of an affinity with “dreamy” kind of music. I guess the song deals with typical anxieties of an introvert, which, if they weren’t already glaringly obvious to me, became painfully unavoidable after moving to New York.

Listen below.

Harm is out 8/28 via Topshelf. Preorder it here.