There’s an inescapable feeling of dread that’s afflicted the soul of the nation. It’s not just the anxieties around ecological catastrophe, cultural inertia, or an ever-atomising society and its engendered isolation, but the collective, nagging suspicion that we’re all wandering a land of artifice, a decay of meaning that festers further in a system held captive by spin, cynicism, and political sleight-of-hand. If you want a vision of the future, imagine two hands ironically flicking air quotes at every expression of sincerity – forever.

The contemporary absurdities and their emanating alienation are a perennial theme across The God of Hackney‘s prior releases. Forming in 2009 as a collection of art school comrades and music collaborators referencing inspirations from Monty Python to Detroit techno, the London/L.A. quartet have cultivated a reputation for conjuring heady, cerebral art-rock with leftfield pop hooks, in addition to mythic live sets from an eight-hour gig in Paris to playing a show for over 3000 people at the Chinese/Russian border. From within the shrouds of their own mystery comes their third LP, a score for “the sclerotic grip of a culture mired in quote, reference and deflated imagination”.

The World in Air Quotes amorphously shifts between jazzy experiments, haunting electronica, and progressive post-punk across the album’s near 40 minutes, further illustrating their knack for harnessing disparate styles and loose arrangements yet still crafting a satisfying whole for each song. Opening track ‘In The Face of A New Science’ emerges toward you like a flickering light on a lifeboat searching for survivors amid the smog of some wreckage. Atonal piano drops and spectral xylophones blink and jitter like a distress signal underneath Kelly Pratt’s evocative trombone, perfectly establishing the band’s ability to find drama buried in their sonic idiosyncrasies.

Subtle disorientation is peppered throughout the album with hues and flavours which fractiously scrape together to reflect the daily bewilderment of modern life. ‘Bardo!’ stitches glitchy electronica with a frenzied, jazzy percussion that affords Andy Cooke’s oblique lyrical observations of limbos in between worlds greater trepidation. This Heat’s dadaist, post-punk hovers over the interlude ‘American Email’, a seemingly found sound tape collage of a clipped English voice phonetically speaking Morse code in a moment that touches on their love for The BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s hauntological time capsules, while deep cavities of private terror are plumbed on the sinister ‘Philip’, a resurrection of Radiohead’s pre-millennial chiller ‘Fitter Happier’ for the new, terrible age of emptiness.

A disquieting harmony between challenging, aural provocation and sublime melodies with piquant songcraft coagulate through The World in Air Quotes. Robert Wyatt’s wistful rumination shines on the cautious tranquil of ‘In This Room’, an elegant examination of digital loneliness and the contradiction between online connections and offline solitude. ‘Broken Pets’ submerges itself into desolate wanders of shoegaze washes and stirring guitar picking, a cinematic snapshot of eerie suburbia spikes with witchy backing croons lifted from Hen Ogledd at their most apparitional, lines like “all these lampposts look the same” speaking to the quiet foreboding that lurks in the everyday mundane.

“It’s a way to find a little light in the dark, a surreal comedy amidst the dread. An attempt to climb out of the hole.” As society lurches on unsure of itself and without direction, the stage is set for a future dictated by those who believe in nothing except the maintenance of a system whose point has long been forgotten, even by those who wallow at its top. The God in Hackney has delivered an antidote to this cultural mire, a truly fascinating piece of work drenched in mysterious musical styles and veiled lyrical abstractions which, without ever careening to pompous intellectual luxuriation, serve as a necessary counterweight to the rot of incuriosity and holds a light toward new avenues for discovery.