Massage

***It’s been four years since L.A. indie-pop mainstays Massage last released new music. Now they return with Coaster, a masterful 10-track album that finds the band facing the upheaval and uncertainty of adulthood the only way they know how: together, five longtime friends, turning out one Perfect Pop Song after another.

The wait was worth it. Massage have always seen themselves as music fans rather than proper “musicians,” and Coaster—their third LP after 2018’s Oh Boy and 2021’s Still Life—still conjures memories of other eras: the braided rumble of The Cure’s “Pictures of You”; the radiant clang of Big Star’s “September Gurls”; the strobe-light sheen of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Bring on the Dancing Horses”; the hazy strum of David Kilgour’s “Shivering”; even the post-Madchester swagger of prime Oasis, if you squint hard enough.

Yet while facets of Coaster might feel familiar, here they add up to something greater, and rarer—a band that finally sounds more like itself than its influences.