Today, Liminal — the experimental psychedelic band out of Bundjalung Country led by producer and drummer Alako Myles — release Hyper Normal, a new album out now via Impressed Recordings. The album radiates with creative possibility, flashing through everything from early prog-rock and metal to jazz fusion and acid house with a strange and alluring fluidity. LISTEN HERE.

Mastered by Beau Thomas (Aphex Twin, Burial), the audacious and confounding album is an audiophonic homage to the strangest corners of humanity; a tome of magical realist fables set to a kinetic assemblage of doom metal riffs, dive-bomb rave synths, knotty post-bop grooves, and magmatic rock music; an absolute monster of a release from a group unafraid to stray from the well-trodden path into more oblique landscapes, mapping their own insular logic and occluded topicality all the while.

WATCH: Hyper Normal (Official Video)

The title Hyper Normal is pulled from “Hypernormalisation,” a term coined by Alexei Yurchak and popularised by Adam Curtis, which describes a phenomenon where people accept a fake version of reality, producing a feeling of being alone in your own world; a psychological disorder affecting the collective consciousness. It’s an apt summation of Liminal’s thematic preoccupations: encroaching apocalypse, the ethical duties of authorship, and our ever-tenuous grasp of truth.

Best manifest through the song ‘Metamorphosis’, Liminal explain “We exist in this tiny pocket of reality, the fact we get to experience anything at all is still not understood properly. I get really attached to things and feel nostalgia to a potentially unhealthy extent. It’s an incommunicable mixture of happy/sad… We all universally have this existential component underlying our day-to-day consciousness. There’s no way we could get on with the things we do, if that type of thought was front-and-centre – you have to continually trick yourself into being in a totally disconnected mode. There’s something very raw, sad and sparkly and about delving into it.”

Elsewhere Hyper Normal expands on various forms of “life” and “death”, conscious and metaphoric. ‘Sepulchre’, like its namesake, dabbles in being trapped in a world that was fabricated, and not seeing it for what it is. ‘Artery’ considers the thought of being there, at a pre-industrialised society – you’d see the seeds were planted for all sorts of dark things waiting to manifest. While ‘Bardo State’, lifted from the Tibetan Book of The Dead, unravels the liminal state between death and rebirth.

Early previews of Hyper Normal are emblematic of Liminal’s unique blend of DIY spirit and conceptual ambition, with an addled aesthetic inspired by vintage 90s braindance CGI and old Warp Records VHS tapes. Over the summer, Liminal’s doomed environmental parable ‘The Crop‘ racked up over a million views for a video that was shot entirely in their lounge room — the face paint left Alako Myles with green eyebrows for three weeks. Meanwhile, the Lynchian creation myth reckoning of the circuit-bent shuffle ‘Glue Gun‘ splits the difference between bootleg Picasso and Windows 95.