In 1995, Sonic Youth, then 14 years into their career, and on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, released a new album, Washing Machine, that closed with a nearly 20-minute song, “The Diamond Sea.” Much of it is a freeform jam of slowly unfurling guitar noise. Seemingly aware of the unpalatableness of a double-digit running time largely given over to feedback, the band released a radio edit of “Diamond Sea,” a fine enough if relatively neutered four-minute version that cuts out the squall. Its purpose was served, to a limit: The song did chart—though never higher than No. 23. Critical success abounded, but the mass market never quite caught on.

By the time the members of the Los Angeles band julie were born (about halfway between the release of “Diamond Sea” and Sonic Youth’s dissolution in 2011), the brief promise of a mainstream moment for difficult rock music, in the wake of Nirvana’s success, was long in the rearview. It was now the Obama years. Boom time for Coldplay fans, not so much dissonance enthusiasts.

But enter Trump, and dark clouds came to pass, as did middle-school graduation; in 2019, as high schoolers, guitarist/vocalist Keyan Pourzand, bassist/vocalist Alexandria Elizabeth, and drummer Dillon Lee, formed julie. The band’s first single, “flutter,” was released in 2020, a year in which talented young devotees of experimental rock music had plenty of reason to shrink from the known world and swath themselves in oceanic swaths of reverb.

julie emerged fully formed on “flutter,” a tightly wound grunge-pop rager with Pourzand and Elizabeth trading vocals, both pleasingly apathetic. That song, like most of the rest of their subsequent songs, was propelled by a totally ballistic drum performance by Lee. They were influenced by Sonic Youth, clearly, but they had little interest in that band’s atonal wandering. Julie’s power was controlled out of the gate.

Over the next three years, the group released a handful of EPs and singles, experimenting with slight shifts in sound. One song might skew more tortured emo, another more triumphant shoegaze. The brusque sheen of the Big Muff pedal is ever present, but they never overindulge in fuzzed-out theatrics. They never noodle too long. Only one song on the band’s debut album, my anti-aircraft friend, clocks in at over five minutes—and then only by three seconds. It seems that in a generation (or two) since the heyday of their preferred breed of experimental rock music, julie have mastered the task of making songs that feel sprawling and massive, but which in reality bloom and dissolve in short order. You can fit a lot of julie songs into one “Diamond Sea.” No radio edit needed.

Now in their early 20s, julie are of the TikTok-native generation, and one lesson that social media has burned into the brains of young people is a need for brevity in storytelling. Consciously or otherwise, the short songs on my anti-aircraft friend are alt-rock epics told in miniature. This tightening of the sound seems to have provided a breakthrough: “flutter” has over 36 million plays on Spotify. I’d imagine my anti-aircraft friend will break them to a new level. It should.

Across the album’s 10 songs, julie have honed their sound, alternating between crunch and jangle, all with great clarity. They’ve generally benefited from a bright mixing job and a sharper fidelity recording. Elizabeth’s bass is up front for many tracks, not providing a counterpoint to Pourzand’s guitar shred so much as a contrapuntal bludgeoning. Across the entire album, Lee plays the drums with the rage of a gorilla pounding its chest. It’s not exactly a chill listen.

So it can be intense in Julie’s wind tunnel, but moments of reduced pace interspersed throughout help you catch your breath. “Very Little Effort” opens with a strutting bass solo, a quick moment of levity, before Elizabeth reads off a list of (mostly) adjectives (“muted/calm/malaise”) before the song kicks in like a terrorist attack on a poetry reading. Things ramp back up on the next song, “Clairbourne Practice,” which alternates between warp-speed thrashing and snotty harmonics. The song switches between movements brazenly, but without any bleeding between its parts. From a lesser band, this sort of thing could give you whiplash. Here, it’s thrilling—music to make your pupils dilate.

Between Elizabeth and Pourzand, Elizabeth is the more beguiling vocalist, with her laissez-faire sneer most effective at reeling you in before the song bonks you on the head. And so the songs where she is lead are the highlights. “Feminine Adornments” features some of the album’s best lyrics. Other songs can be a bit cryptic (haven’t quite been able to puzzle out the meaning of “​​Shaolin monks they finally freak/Your little birds come all this way/One like you, for a mutt like me”), but “I’ll defile/I’ll be clean/I’ll be mean and raw,” feels like something you scratch into your desk with a pen knife.

As much as I love this record, it would be naive to not admit that this type of thing has been done before. The tortured punch of Unwound, the sour rage of Hole, the distorted sass of Jesus and Mary Chain, and, of course, the everything of Sonic Youth. Right now, this sound has legs, and julie find themselves playing alongside a group of young bands who’ve similarly been entranced by the music of the ’90s. But Julie are just better than their peers. They’ve figured out how to absorb their influences while iterating their way into innovation. On each song, julie sound more like themselves: burrowing, burrowing, burrowing, each song digging deeper into the soil.

Nowhere is their vision clearer or more effective than on my anti-aircraft friend’s opener, “Catalogue.” At about two minutes into the song—which until that moment has primarily moved with hurricane force—things get really slow and quiet. There’s an ominous plucking of the bass and a small shimmer of guitar, the kind of sound you get when you strum the strings on the headstock, the part you’re not supposed to play. And then, after that moment of respite, the band comes roaring back. There’s a squall of feedback that you think could last forever. With other bands, it would. But it doesn’t come to pass. Instead, the song gathers itself for what seems could be a ramping up to violent explosion. Ok, you think, here it comes. But that doesn’t happen either. What does happen to the song is a surprise: It ends.