Highsigh, formed from Deerhoof and Jobs, release the album Once Bend

Highsigh, a new indie trio pulling members from Deerhoof, Jobs and Skeletons, released their debut album, "Once Bend." Core members Ro Lundberg of Jobs, John Dieterich of Deerhoof and Matt Mehlan of Skeletons built the record around a shared fixation on rhythm, and the Quietus's Matthew Horton called it "a dense mix of exploratory musical backgrounds" that mostly sounds like one too.

All three members are part-time percussionists, and it shows: they whip up a chaotic burst on "Words We Choose" before improbably locking into a groove, and fall into a military-tattoo rhythm behind the dreamy glitches of "Relax Redux." Horton described the beats as feeling alien to their surroundings, standing out as the songs' main character rather than a backing element.

Guest vocalists Alexandra Lakind, Macie Stewart and Paige Alice Naylor chant impressionistic, often disjointed lyrics over the trio's own diffident half-spoken vocals, a mesh Horton compared to Dirty Projectors on the maximalist title track "Once Bend" and the bustling "I Love The Room I Live In."

The album peaks, in Horton's telling, on "Plastic Designed Spoonlike," with its warring bleeps and cello, the jazzy horns of "Don't Crowd the Eye," and especially the title track, which unfurls from a country-garden sound collage recalling the Beatles' "Revolution 9" into raw, untutored strings in its final 30 seconds that land somewhere closer to Talk Talk's "Eden."

Not every experiment lands cleanly: Horton called the one-two of "Fertile" and "to grow in lightness" a "cacophonous" stretch of guitar-sawing that tests the listener's patience, though he judged the overall effect "more unsettling than unbearable." He summed up the record's guiding logic simply: "Throw enough noise, beats, crazy notions and melodic flashes at a problem and it goes away."