Although its nine songs revolve entirely around a single unifying idea, of life and personality forged from the revelatory moments of lived experience, to describe Los Angeles band Lo Moon’s third outing, I Wish You Way More Than Luck, as a concept album wouldn’t be entirely correct.

Sonically bold and ambitious, fiercely literate and imagistic, the songs dance around their theme, not so much playing from track to track, as flowing through peaks and troughs of fervent emotion. It’s the singular work of a group of musicians whose confidence and abilities have not only scaled the heights of their ambitions but outstripped them. Luck has little to do with it.

I Wish You Way More Than Luck is an album about leaving things behind—family, places, youth, relationships, time—and the traces that linger in the mind long after their physicality has receded. The infinitely transient. What is music, or songwriting, anyway, but memory married to emotion. Feeling sustained. Echoes of lives lived and lives imagined. An ethereal sense of self made tangible, by intangibles. Frequencies colliding. Until we are lost inside a moment. That moment is all. It defines us, and can inform us, if we let it. And we should.

Recorded at the War On Drugs and Modest Mouse’s studios, and mixed by Alan Moulder.