Matt Mondanile, the musician behind Los Angeles project Ducktails, opens his new album with a lush, instrumental track. It’s an effective introduction to the album, Ducktails’ fifth full-length, setting up the opulent pop songs that are subsequently unveiled. Mondanile’s Ducktails music has surfaced in variously stylistic forms, sometimes more complexly wrought than others. Here, the songs are layered and plush, bolstered by ethereal, surging instrumental melodies and the musician’s pensive croon. These are much more cohesively precise numbers than some of Ducktails’ past releases, yielding a deeply effective and wholly immersive listening experience. “Into The Sky” is a shimmery indie-pop track, encrusted in a delicate, gleaming melody, while “Surreal Exposure” is a boisterous, acoustic rocker that aptly offsets the album’s more introspective ambient numbers. Mondanile infuses the songs with sincere emotion, but it’s more composed than raw, with songs like contemplative ballad “Medieval” revealing almost as much in its melody as its lyrics. Producer Rob Schnapf, known for his work with Elliott Smith, aided the musician, and that refinement shows in the careful construction of the songs, which are more contained than Mondanile’s early, more experimental work with the project. The disc closes with an evocatively beautiful, baroque-sounding song that leaves you reveling in its sounds—and the emotional echoes those sounds leave behind.