Wilco have been a lot of things in their 30-year career, but they’ve never been an EP band. Where other acts use the format as a testing ground for new ideas, Wilco always performed their wildest experiments on their studio albums, and Jeff Tweedy has historically favored the LP and the lengthy live set as forums for working through big ideas and worrying over deep uncertainties. Their EPs have almost always been promotional tools, whether it’s their short live set for iTunes or the bonus CDs they’ve appended to proper albums. Even 2003’s More Like the Moon started out as a promo for the Australian edition of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before it received a standalone release. They’ve been dumping grounds for live cuts and leftovers rather than major statements in and of themselves.

Hot Sun Cool Shroud ostensibly serves a similar purpose: Wilco culled tracks from recent sessions and are releasing the EP to coincide with this year’s Solid Sound Festival, where concertgoers will have first dibs on exclusive vinyl before it gets a wider release later this year. But this feels like the first time the band has crafted an EP as a coherent statement with the purpose, if not the weight, of a full LP. There’s an intentionality here that wasn’t present even on More Like the Moon, an embrace of the possibilities of the shorter format. They use the medium surprisingly well, establishing and then elaborating on a “summertime-after-dark” vibe (to use Tweedy’s description). It doesn’t mean much to say Hot Sun is the best EP Wilco have ever made, because there’s not much competition. It means more to say that it feels complete, like a haiku.

Opener “Hot Sun” practically melts from the heat, guitar notes bending and warping as Tweedy sings about the physical pleasure of sunlight hitting skin. With that sensation comes a nagging doubt, possibly about climate change: “Shouldn’t I be doing something?” he asks himself. “What can I do? What can I do?” These two oppositional feelings sit in the song as equals, not just as things to experience, but to write about. “What’s the word I want?” Tweedy sings, as though concerned he might not fully convey either the joy or the fear. Few artists can break the fourth wall of a song so eloquently without sounding too clever.

With summer as a general theme, Hot Sun is structured in two acts, each side of the 10″ featuring an instrumental bracketed by two vocal-centric tracks. In this setting Wilco sound more focused, the songs tauter in their melodies and more purposeful in their arrangements, even when those arrangements seem designed to be disorderly. The instrumentals move by their own logic—especially “Livid,” a collision of reckless post-punk guitars that recalls A Ghost Is Born—but every song makes space for a little bit of noise, a little bit of chaos. Even the relatively twangy “Say You Love Me” has a heatsick quaver as they offer up a rousing, reassuring, aching sing-along chorus that will no doubt sound great at Mass MoCA.

Especially for a short EP, there are a lot of different Wilcos on Hot Sun Cool Shroud. There’s Wilco the dad rockers on “Hot Sun,” still figuring out their responsibilities to their children and everybody else. There’s Wilco the noisemakers on “Inside the Bell Bones,” screwing around in the studio. There’s Wilco the frayed worrywarts on “Ice Cream,” wondering how anybody could love them. There’s Wilco the festival organizers, Wilco the migraine rockers, Wilco the country-rock band, Wilco the goofballs, Wilco the Wilcos. To this familiar parade, add Wilco the EP band, elevating a modest tracklist into something much bigger than itself, and demonstrating how they’ve kept in touch with all those different Wilcos for so long.