Give audiences a way into the bizarre and a way out of the normal. This ethos guides pop-minded experimentalists JOBS, and can be heard all over their latest full-length Soft Sounds. The album represents a creative leap forward for the quartet, one that finds them fusing organic, uniquely human gestures with precise repetition, creating an overall sound with distant echoes of folk songs, IDM, and 1970s jazz fusion. However, despite the subdued and soothing connotations those antecedents – and indeed the album’s very title – might conjure, Soft Sounds is a full-spectrum sonic experience best played loud, replete with songs that crackle with clarity and urgency.

Recorded during drummer Max Jaffe’s recording residency at Brooklyn cultural center Pioneer Works, these sessions marked the quartet’s jubilant return to the in-person interplay that sustains their creative partnership and drives their most salient work. It was also the first occasion for Jaffe to take the helm as recording and mix engineer for the group, simultaneously using his hybrid electro-acoustic drum kit as a command center for many of the synthesizers, samplers, and effects that undergird Soft Sounds. The band arrived at these sessions with only a couple of guitarist Dave Scanlon’s melodies, bassist Ro Lundberg’s harmonic structures, and violist Jessica Pavone’s lines of lyrics. Despite the relatively modest batch of ideas, the sense of total autonomy afforded by the residency allowed them to write, orchestrate, record, edit, and mix in a semi-concurrent flow state.

Outside the sessions, the making of Soft Sounds coincided with significant life changes for each member of JOBS. Some moved across the US. Family formations grew, shrank, and shifted. All four members made moves in their own careers, musically and beyond. For Lundberg, this music also developed alongside an expanding view of their own gender, which informed their contributions to the album. Lyrics for “There is Differing” play with and pushes English’s sometimes rigid language binary: around gender as well as the divide between the self and others. Meanwhile, songs such as “Allure" and “You Are The Object” employ subtle vocal pitch shifting and processing to expand one’s sonic identity, a la hyperpop’s shining light SOPHIE.

The idea of description creates a throughline across Soft Sounds. Lyrically, description and data dominate songs like parts 1 and 2 of “List The Creator Twice.” With a warm detachment that recalls Alvin Lucier, Scanlon intones, “perhaps all we are building is a description / actual descriptions with sincere feeling of possible actions in fabricated residences.” This album-spanning diptych presents a meditation on the voyeuristic nature of description, first through a cleansed and bright recording in Part 1, which opens the album, and then as an artifact of an extended studio jam that forms much of the album’s final third in Part 2. “While holding hands we feel another’s hand and our own being held. The sensation is one type of experience. A photograph of two people holding hands describes the sensation, and thinking of what this sensation might be is its own separate experience,” Scanlon says. “The description may gesture to an experience, but the interpretation of a description is a unique event.”

Across Soft Sounds, the sonic palette expands and contracts as each song sees fit. In JOBS’ music, Mark Hollis-type abstraction sits comfortably alongside grooves inspired by Jaffe’s time in Malawi. Their immersive sonic spaces suggest the speaker-test work of Ryoji Ikeda offset by soft-synth wobbles that recall an asexual reimagining of “brostep.” It’s in this reordering of the familiar and foreign that JOBS’ fluid approach reveals a sense of playful wonder and depth. Soft Sounds represents JOBS at a new state of maturity and self actualization as they hone their individual artistry and their collaboration across time zones and milestones.