You know that thing where you’re dreaming and a parade of unlikely elements surrounds you, but it somehow all seems very natural and normal to you—until you think about it later? Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Radar Brothers’ eighth record. The band multiplied like amoebas into a six-piece collective brotherhood, possibly with secret passwords and strange rituals.

The band spent the past few years collaborating, meshing their writing styles and recording an album that seamlessly welds together various worlds—not altogether unlikely influences, just … unexpected. Somehow, they make it sound as natural as apples growing from a grapefruit tree—but the kind you see in a dream, where you pick an apple, eat it to the core, and hand the rest to Burgess Meredith, who just happens to be walking beside you and hands the apple back to you, uneaten.

The band called the record Eight (being their eighth), and it may well be Radar Brothers’ darkest, hardest rocking, most psychedelic, and yet most intensely personal album to date.

From Putnam’s tribute to Joni Mitchell’s cover art (The Hissing of Summer Lawns) to the surreal, picturesque lyrics to the unidentifiable textures and sounds that pour from your speakers like liquid paintings—this may also be the band’s most visual album to date.

So forget everything that you know or have ever thought about Radar Brothers. From the very start, Eight explodes with newness and bold, otherworldly jaunts. While paying tribute to their past on several songs, the band retains its swagger in this new territory throughout the rest.