Mushroom Music Publishing

The Walkmen are kings of dejection. For about decade now, they've turned their albums into symphonies of disappointment and resentment and regret. Their proudest moments, then, are also their most down-and-out. Their best song, "The Rat", is a world-weary, old-before-its-time rager, a song from a young guy seeing that he's already falling out of step with the universe and feeling pissed about it. Their second-best song, "In the New Year", sounds triumphant and optimistic at first, but on further listens it reveals itself to be as much a plea as anything else, a secular prayer that shit just please start working out right. The specific brand of desperation that the band conjures is miles away from, say, the throbbing, dread-laced depression of fellow dapper New Yorkers the National. The Walkmen are more theatrical and unwound than that-- they're the guys out in the middle of the street, screaming up at the sky, begging to know why everything always falls apart.

In that elegantly disheveled mutter-wail thing of his, frontman Hamilton Leithauser starts new album Lisbon off by singing: "You're with someone else tomorrow night/ Doesn't matter to me/ 'Cause as the sun dies into the hill/ You got all I need." He's sad and pathetic and needy and yet somehow still smooth, which is sort of the central animating paradox at the heart of the Walkmen. They make these wounded, anxious songs, but they make them so confidently, with such unearthly rich-guy assurance. The band's specific style of indie rock is very rooted in a scrappy, scratchy New York tradition that dates back to the Velvet Underground or Bob Dylan, but their take on it is theirs and theirs alone. You know one of their songs right away when those winding, circular guitars and surging drums and gargling vocals kick in. They're so performative in their sadness, but that stuff never rankles or comes off tantrumy, since the band is just so good at this stuff. There's a song on Lisbon called "Woe Is Me", and it's not even remotely a joke. Great song, too.

Leithauser sings guarded, terse stuff that isn't necessarily understood, but he wails it so hard that it comes out anthemic: "You took the high road! I couldn't find you!" The Walkmen play with restraint, and they don't usually allow themselves earth-shaking moments like that. But when those moments come, they're enough to send you spinning.