The first really grabbing moment on Sweet Crude’s sophomore album happens midway through the opening track, “COGO.” At the point where you expect an instrumental solo, front-woman Alexis Marceaux instead goes into a Laurie Anderson-esque spoken bit about what the next century will be like: Cars will fly, dogs will walk themselves, but human nature will be about the same. It’s a surprise, but somehow it fits perfectly on a track that already has a funky bass-line, bilingual vocals and two different chant-along choruses. And it sums up what Sweet Crude is all about: namely pop music with endless possibilities.

It can’t be easy to record a band with multiple percussion, synthesizers, layered vocals and a love for exotic sounds. But producer Sonny DiPerri (of Animal Collective fame) manages it, giving the album a pop sparkle without shortchanging the band’s eccentricities. The percussion doesn’t overwhelm everything, but it never sounds like a conventional drummer either (and on “Porkupine,” the rhythm is set by what sounds like a horse snorting, before the heavy bass-line kicks in). The alternating French/English vocals also make musical sense: Unless you’re also bilingual, the lyrics shift from straightforward to mysterious and back. And while there’s nothing explicitly Cajun here, there are moments—a fiddle here, a sampled traditional singer there—where the roots show through. Their taste in pop seems to hark back to the ’80s, with hints of Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel and Prince—and to the thrill of discovery that pop music offered at the time. Always a fine singer, Marceaux pushes a little further here, both in her tradeoffs with co-founder Sam Craft and in her solo turns. “Impussiance” and “Ultimatum,” both lean toward R&B and feature pure, emotive singing.

The songs cycle into a loose-knit concept album about coming through hard times, with the exuberant tunes upfront and the grittier ones following. The album’s darkest moment, “Skin” sounds like it could be about COVID-19 (which a couple of band members lived through), though it was likely recorded beforehand—in either case, the chorus of “Whose skin am I in, it isn’t mine anymore” packs an emotional kick. The closing track, “The Purge” is about moving forward by getting rid of stuff you’ve collected; like everything else here is has a smart lyric and a memorable hook. When your songs are this good, the tricky arrangements are lagniappe.