>> It’s been four years since L.A. indie-pop mainstays Massage last released new music. Now, on Oct. 10, 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.

650 copies on Milky Clear vinyl