One month ago today, Sydney rock band Gang Of Youths returned with “the angel of 8th ave.,” their first new song since 2017’s Go Farther In Lightness. The track infused the group’s hearty arena-indie sound with some War On Drugs/Killers style synth action, and upon its release, singer David Le’aupepe told Zane Lowe, “It’s probably the only song that you’ll hear from us from now that sounds remotely kind of what we sounded like the previous kind of six to eight years.”

Today, we get our first test case for that statement. Gang Of Youths have surprise-released a new EP called total serene. It includes three tracks, starting with the aforementioned “the angel of 8th ave.” The closing song, “unison,” is much moodier and more low-key than usual — the new lowercase fixation is starting to make sense — but it ends with some hard-hitting drums that may or may not be programmed. “unison” sounds not unlike Elbow, whose Asleep In The Back title track is covered on the EP as well, though the National and U2 come through big time as well.

“‘unison’ is a deeply important track for us that really signals where the music is headed on the new record,” Le’aupepe says in a press release. “I conceived the song in Samoa, my ancestral homeland. Here we sample and introduce the work of David Fanshawe, who travelled to the Pacific Islands in the 1980s and recorded the most extensive library of indigenous Pacific music anywhere in the world.” As for the Elbow cover: “We love Elbow and we thought it was thematically relevant. It couldn’t have been anything other than ‘Asleep In The Back.'”

Hear the whole EP below.

total serene is out now on Warner Records.