Indiana’s and now Philadelphia’s Honey Radar have created an amazing amalgamation of meandering lo-fi bedroom jams and bold 60’s Brit Rock on their new release, Blank Cartoon. Released in May on What’s Your Rupture? (previously Parquet Courts and Fucked Up) Blank Cartoon is a special kind of earworm. It’s rousing, flashes of all-American nostalgia shining through driving, fuzzy guitar. The hooks on “Fort Wayne Mermaids” and “Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast” could easily belong on a shelf of decades-old favorites, never relegated to a inhospitable milk crate in the garage. The kind of music you’d remember, padding along the carpet in the hallways of your childhood home. There’s an impossible, effervescent soul to this album that shines through even in its most unassuming moments, a floaty, mind-melding day-in-the-life.

Despite this accessibility, the album doesn’t shy away from arty noisiness, providing chaos in the meditative din of “Beethoven DUI” and the quietly triumphant “Bagpipe Jazz is Real.” The album is also a lengthy 18 tracks, mini-vignettes like “Postcard Target” clocking in at 37 seconds of dreamlike storytelling. The noisiness and the speed by which the album switches tones, thoughts and movement is done with zero self consciousness. As a listener, I’m content to follow along, a back and forth volley between the types of jangly, screaming riffs that close “Sick Day #2” and the familiar catchiness of the opening of “(The Man with a) Rayon Acetate Throat” that this album is laden with. I’m compelled to find a meadow to lay in through the solemn introspection of “Pan Music” while the rhythmic unhurried, declarations of “Caterpiller” belong on a soundtrack to a cross-country road trip, staring out the window, watching the points on the horizon shift in and out of focus. The album blends both, with deceptive and unforgettable ease.