Earlier this year, the Brooklyn group Peel Dream Magazine released their sophomore album Agitprop Alterna. Anchored by immediately memorable tracks like the surging haze of “Pill” or the infectious and warped krautrock pop of “Emotional Devotion Creator,” it ranked as one of our favorite albums of the year so far. Perhaps none of us were expecting another batch of new Peel Dream music anytime soon, especially as Agitprop Alterna was released into a quarantine that kept musicians out of the studio. But as it turns out, Peel Dream Magazine are back already with a new EP — surprise released today, in conjunction with Bandcamp’s latest day of waiving their fees to benefit musicians and other causes.

The new EP is called Moral Panics, and it’s all material that comes from the Agitprop Alterna sessions. It’s named for Stanley Cohen’s book Folk Devils And Moral Panics, a sociological study of media treatment of the mod movement in ’60s Britain. If you’ve listened to any of Peel Dream’s music so far, you already know they combine swirling or droning soundscapes derived from shoegaze and other iterations of psychedelia with some pretty heady, academic themes. Starting with the basis of Cohen’s book, Moral Panics is apparently no different, with a press release describing it as “investigations into those fraught areas where art, culture, and commerce meet.”

Rather than a loose collection of leftovers, Moral Panics plays like an extra passage of the Agitprop Alterna story. “New Culture” is the overdriven charge out the gates akin to “Pill,” and from there the EP leans way into the spacier side of Peel Dream’s sound. Another highlight is “Life At The Movies,” which plays like a strung-out Britpop track with a bit of Velvet Underground in its DNA, too. That leads to the aqueous meditation of instrumental “The Furthest Nearby Place,” which is the conclusion before the addendum of a stripped-down demo of “Clean Water.” Check it out below.

The Moral Panics EP is out now. Get it at Peel Dream Magazine’s Bandcamp page.