A lyric in “Our Lifestyles Incandescent”-“We end up under the covers/but couldn’t be further from each other”-is capable of folding the entire Johnny Foreigner universe into itself. “When your entourage froze/I’d never seen you so exposed/And I’ve seen you with no clothes,” Berrow sings in “The X and the O.” Even their meanest lyrics are haunted by ghosts, though, which often manifest in a form of delayed melancholy-a kind of hangover. “I have walked into every ocean going,” guitarist Alexei Berrow sings in “Undevastator,” “holding hope out for future us/Hoping holding out was enough.” Later, on “The Worst of Us,” bassist Kelly Parker sings, “The streets shrink and the skyline blocks the sun/Whole weeks where I never see daylight/I’ve been dreaming of the ocean.” There’s a severe clarity to Johnny Foreigner lyrics, as if written under the sort of bitterness and honesty only accessed after approximately three drinks. Mono No Aware is specifically devoted to coastlines and to oceans. Johnny Foreigner songs tend to be about geography, and how it combines with memory to produce something like three-dimensional feelings. When “If You Can’t Be Honest, Be Awesome” lifts off into the remote and aerial region of an American Football song, you can feel the dissonance and tension of the transition. These transitions aren’t completely seamless you can hear the stitching. It radiates a feeling of seasickness, the guitars and drums lurching from extreme gravity into total freefall. Mono No Aware isn’t as varied, but its structures have a tendency to digress, evaporate, and recombine, as if one is driving through a radically shrunken landscape. Everything, in which unstable punk songs degenerated into piano ballads which then degenerated further into sound collages and spoken word.

Mono No Aware, their fifth album, which coincides with their ten-year anniversary as a band, is their most elastic and adventurous record since 2011’s Johnny Foreigner vs. The opening seconds of their 2014 record You Can Do Better, in which snare rolls are processed and multiplied until they resemble explosions in a hollow cylinder, sound like distant cousins of Blink-182’s “Feeling This.” They’ve covered American Football’s “Never Meant,” but their version transfers the expansive atmosphere of the original into their own, narrower gravity, the distinct guitar phrases shivering in anxious proximity to each other. Johnny Foreigner songs often seem made up of components of older emo and pop-punk songs, but remembered wrong, reversed and compressed into anxious nodes. When I listen to the music of British punk band Johnny Foreigner, I’m reminded of those robots, in both design and velocity.

Foreigner albums