Australian alt-rock quartet Paint sweeten up a midlife crisis on blissfully fuzzy “Dial Tone”

The cover art for Paint's Gift Shop is littered with childhood ephemera: the sorts of trinkets almost preternaturally destined for tenure upon dusted-over shelves, or to be swept under beds to neighbour dust bunnies. To name a few: a bug-eyed baby deer, porcelain rabbits, a troll doll with a shock of magenta hair. With an almost sickly yellow backdrop, the image carries both quirky charm and feverish, lightheaded yet blissful nostalgia.

It’s a perfect image to represent the songs on the EP, a record as playful as it is angsty, as wryly humorous as it is bursting with heartfelt sincerity; it glitters with sprightly, youthful energy all while the dust of twenty-something dread starts to settle in. Gift Shop sees the band carving out their most thrilling and immersive soundscapes yet: one second, you’re soaring to Cocteau Twins-esque, shoegazey dream pop peaks; the next, you’re slung through the grime of crunchy, shambolic riffs. There is something rapturous to even the fuzziest murks, though. Each track possesses both the sugary sweetness and effortless cool of a late ’90s or early ’00s coming-of-age movie theme song (who doesn’t, somewhere in their heart, just love those songs?).

“It’s kind of a mixed bag that we thought was equivalent to the bizarre mix of items you find in small, country gift shops,” vocalist Anya says of Gift Shop. “The songs are more varied in their style, pace and production than our previous work and incorporate more clean and acoustic guitar between louder distorted sections as well as more sample use.”

The record teems with life (there’s a dog barking, muffled screaming, miscellaneous bleeps and blorps), and “Dial Tone” perhaps best exemplifies the pleasure of the band’s hodgepodge approach: you’ll come for the brrring commencing the track and stay for its Slow Pulp-esque breeziness, which glitches and disintegrates into a erratic, static-heavy breakdown. The musical disarray is contagiously fun, and it makes for an apt backdrop to Anya’s hilariously relatable chronicle of the pitfalls of getting older, from flimsy friendships to waking up alone to feeling “washed up” for the first time.

Recalling a humbling all-ages gig the band once played that inspired the song’s lyrics, Anya says: “It was literally filled with underaged kids drinking cruisers (love cruisers though no shade), and I had just turned 24, which was scaring me. I started feeling so washed up and embarrassed to be playing with younger people because I felt like I was a loser. I think I was just having a midlife crisis.” A midlife crisis has never sounded sweeter than on Gift Shop.