Hail the high priests of the Church of Good Vibes. Feel a healing wave envelop the dance party such that you later feel compelled to sport their initials on wristbands, necklaces, bumper stickers. SF is for Still Flyin’, the ever-shuffling lineup of San Francisco superfriends, heady with summer funshine. At least that’s the immediate impression that glances off their shiny, happy faces in concert, off the lips of horns, raised high and spilling out melodies with all the grace and buoyancy of birds. But on closer inspection the band’s emotional range goes, y’know, Someway Further.

On first hearing, 2009 debut Never Gonna Touch the Ground could seem overwhelmingly upbeat, with ‘Dead Memory Man’ and ‘Gingko Biloba’ the only obvious exceptions (and really these two tracks were of a kind, both dealing with the fear of losing one’s memory). But Sean Rawls and co also couched a lot of hard-hitting shit in those high tempos and major keys. ‘Good Thing It’s a Ghost Town Round Here’, for example, may have been danceable beyond belief, but it also boasted the narrative economy and depth of flash fiction, lending due poignancy to the experience of Monday Morning Hangover In Office.

So though On A Bedroom Wall feels broader than its precursor, this is not because its precursor was narrow. It is simply that Still Flyin’ have expanded their sonic palette over the last few years, tours, and EPs – and throughout this album those new sounds are present, correct and daring you to ignore them.

What kind of new sounds? I have but one word that describes them, and it betrays my age and my ignorance and isn’t even an adjective, but here goes: Eighties. And you might ask what the hell kind of infinite ballpark do I call that, and I can only shrug and push the evidence towards you in boombox form. Opener ‘Elsie Dormer’ exudes Eighties je-ne-sais-quwhatever like a perfume, drifting through kitschy synths, Collins-gauge percussion and brightest, whitest charm-bracelet guitar. And what follows really does seem to inhabit an infinite ballpark: ‘Travelin’ Man’ and ‘Big Trouble in Little Alabama’ project vastness, their backing vocals lush with reverb, their riffs floodlit with self-importance. There’s the high drama of the New Romantics to one side and the tight, earnest urgency of indiepop to the other: ‘Spirits’ ripples and chirps as close as ‘Close To Me’, jangles and growls ”one ghost is not enough” as distant as thunder.

Fleetingly, you may taste Still Flyin’ Classic. ‘Take these Streets’ and ‘Candlemaker’ are pretty standard fare, layering Rawls’s sidelong, boyish vocals over whisper rhythms and clipped little guitar chords until the momentum runneth over. ‘Cleat Talkin’’ exalts the joys of sport – “Some people can’t change the earth, some people just break the turf/I ain’t no Stephen Hawking, my cleats do all the talking” – over a bass/kalimba shimmy as affable as anything by band-kin Architecture in Helsinki.

But the eightiesness does pervade, seeping into every corner as dry ice, crowding about the feet of straightforward, hooksy anthems like ‘Camouflage Detection’ till they appear to stand ankle-deep in cumulus. It’s a pure vapour of everything that made the decade musically thrilling, the excruciating byproducts left behind. Basically, it elevates an already great band to the altitude of Good Vibe Heaven: thank the party gods, they’re still flyin’, still.