How serious are Joe, Kevin, and Nick Jonas about stoking a carefree vibe on their sixth full-length? Not only did they give it the hair-tossing title The Album, they’ve stock it with songs that have titles like “Vacation Eyes,” “Summer in the Hamptons,” and “Vacation Baby.” The result is a sparkling pop party full of romance and hooks, with the three brothers—along with pop maximalist Jon Bellion and other top-tier producers—flexing their songwriting and harmonic chops.

Since forming in 2005, Jonas Brothers have been making sneakily sophisticated pop songs that blend of-the-moment trends with bits borrowed from funk. The Album throws that formula back a bit, bringing in sonic cues from the glossiest moments of the Seventies—plush synths on “Vacation Eyes,” crystalline pianos on “Montana Sky,” Bee Gees-quality harmonies all over the place—in a way that makes its release at the outset of pool-party season uncannily timed.  

The only true dud is “Americana,” a funk-country nugget that’s the band’s attempt at stoking connection between the country’s fractured factions. It reels off pop-culture totems—in addition to “Americana, blue jeans, and marijuana,” Jay-Z, James Dean, and Jersey Shore get name-checked—as a way of showing that yes, these states can truly become united once again. It’s an admirable effort, but one that feels too mawkish and rooted in the pre-Twitter past (James Dean??) to really mean anything.  

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Aside from that awkward reach across the aisle, The Album’s other attempts to dig into weightier matters have better results.  “Little Bird” is a sweet meditation on parenthood that’s destined to be played at weddings for decades to come, even if there’s one Joe-sung verse that connects the dots between giving a daughter away at the altar and his own mortality (“he’s gonna love you when I gotta leave you/Gotta believe it when the Lord takes me home,” the dad of two sings heteronormatively).  

Closing track “Walls” is the only song to have Bellion credited as a collaborator, an appropriate touch for the record’s hugedt track, a power-ballad-slash-hymn that uses a crying wall as its central metaphor. (“If you ever left me, I would die/And even the walls would cry,” he wails.) It opens with Joe’s voice swathed in echo and accompanied by an acoustic guitar, the strains of a church organ, and effects; eventually Nick’s falsetto leads a charging choir into the party, turning the song into a full-on revival before it floats back to earth. It’s a heavy end to The Album’s party, but it shows how Jonas Brothers’ ambition is only getting bigger as its legacy expands.