No Rules Sandy (Leaf Green Vinyl)

Some bands can create entire albums on short-term writing jags, but until now, Sylvan Esso was not one of them.

But that speed— and the resulting looseness and live-wire energy in their songs— is one of many things that feels like brand-new territory in No Rules Sandy, their fourth studio album, out August 12, 2022. Describing their first three albums as a trilogy that is now complete, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn see No Rules Sandy as the beginning of a new period, with songs that are “wilder and stranger and more cathartic than the band used to be,” as Sanborn puts it. “It feels like who we actually are,” Meath adds. “It just feels like us. We’re not trying to fit into the mold, just happily being our freak selves.”

Both describe No Rules Sandy as their most personal project— right in the title, after all, is Sanborn’s own nickname. The most intimate—but still enigmatic— details arrive in interstitial moments between tracks, featuring voicemails from loved ones, birdsong from outside their studio, Betty’s, the voices of children, and other life detritus transformed into eternal art. “It feels like this diary entry from this very specific time,” Sanborn says of the interstitials, which fill the gaps between songs and make No Rules Sandy an unbroken ribbon of sound, a source of wildness and energy that continues from the album’s first moment to the last.