Can you feel it coming? Quickening on the horizon, a rustle of Uggs and shutter shades, skinny jeans and chunky highlights; a murmur of Friendster notifications in Netscape browsers and mainstremo bands on white iPods. Its name is aughties nostalgia, and it is almost upon us. The realization elicits a shock quickly followed by a no doy, considering the moribund state of nineties nostalgia. Look around you: The Toadies are trapped on a purgatorial tour that presumably consists of Possum Kingdom eleven times per night; the half-hearted comeback of chain wallets is wringing out the fashion dregs. Only a few unavailable seasons of Blossom still stand between us and total nineties depletion.

The aughts werent all well-dressed men singing songs for oblivion, hate-watching their own fame, and getting one another strung out on drugs, as portrayed in Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodmans recent oral history of post-9/11 New York rock. If some were hungry, others were haunted, and countered the wave of spartan decadence with arcane varietals of messianic monk-progbands like TV on the Radio and, of course, Grizzly Bear. While Casablancas and them rocked rumpled suits and struck poses of prep-school dissipation, Grizzly Bear were otherworldly ciphers whose ranks included a bona fide merman yowling in dolphin language and blowing a conch shell. Cultivating the tempo and grandeur of sances, they led a sensitive, severe shadow trend to all the disaffected hedonism, not unlike the post-acoustic bonfire music the art-hippies in Animal Collective were busy turning into a genre.

If Grizzly Bears influence was minted in the aughts, their commercial peak was 2012s lavish, laborious Shields, a validation that also felt like a logical conclusion. They scattered and did grown-ass things for a whilekids, divorces, leaving New Yorkbefore returning today with Painted Ruins, their first record in five years. Pieced together from afar, and consequently cautious, it seems unlikely to shift the bands attenuated trajectory. But it comes at an opportune moment in the nostalgia cycle, being so stoic and redolent of something were about to start missing.

It all started in the bedroom of Ed Droste, whose 2004 debut, Horn of Plenty, suggested a universe in which Leonard Cohen joined the Velvet Underground. Drostes sparse, droning, hollowed dirges conveyed a shaken austerity that lots of people identified with. Though the Strokes and Grizzly Bear sounded little alike, they and other New York bands were united in struggling to make and hold onto meanings, rather than bursting with an overabundance of them, in the manner of more ecstatic, perhaps more typical, rock musicians.

It took the addition of Daniel Rossen, a second singer, songwriter, and guitaristinsofar as you can define those roles in the all-singing, all-playing approach that Grizzly Bear helped imprint on the erato round out the scheme on 2006s Yellow House. Rossen, who has his own following with Department of Eagles, paneled in Drostes moody grays with songwriterly woodgrain. Yellow House was their most lovable album, and 2009s Veckatimest was probably their best, expertly balancing sere saturnalia with pert pop like Two Weeks.

But Shields, though critically acclaimed, was just not, generally speaking, a fun album to make, as Droste said recently. Its foggy-mountain jams are diligent but not joyful; even the beloved Sleeping Ute unwelcomely reminds me of a time when we had to listen to bass solos and Yeasayer, often simultaneously. Painted Ruins is an easier go. It has all the vibes and parts youd expectthe jagged somnolence, the lathed bass lines, the martial drumrolls and oceanic swells, the bright, crispy chords stabbing through the mannered churn like sun spikes though a hangover. Slinky grooves, like Steely Dan gone mod, exfoliate; Mourning Sound has a particularly perky thump and sway.

The choice of the wandering Three Rings as lead single indicates how utterly, even for Grizzly Bear, this record is about the rolling landscape, not the particular sights. Its a landscape haunted more by the past than by the present, and the title has an unmissable implication of putting a fresh coat on something inhabited mainly by memory. This is bigger than dated trends. Grizzly Bear were forged in a time when prestige music was learning to be made for the Internet in a certain way, pored over by the type of people who used to sit with headphones and liner notes, which created a market for prestige music that demanded more and more complexity, more ambiguity, more fiddly bits to hold our fragmenting attention.

In the 2010s, the aughties fad for the hermetic that Painted Ruins revives has passed. More music is made for a populist, personalized vision of the Internet than for an elite one. Bold statements of identity, swirls of social color, and off-the-cuff inspiration are the temper of our times. Of course Grizzly Bear cant shake the aughties by tunneling into vintage psych-pop citations. Theyre a band that was always prized for looking in, not out; its drowsy, not woke, elaborate without urgency.

Four Cypruses glimmers into being with magisterial serenity, beautifully rises and falls for a while, and fadesout. Its chaos, but it works, Rossen shrugs. Aquarian touches the lighter side of Captain Beefheart, laying out trippy thickets for people who havent tripped in years. Rossen sings about upcountry drifters in permanent repose on the spidery Glass Hillside, which perfectly captures the records overall sense of drifting disengagement, of shifting through internal gears and sorting out old lives. The forms are large, the meanings small, an inversion of contemporary musics vitality. Painted Ruins is monumental at a time when monuments fall.

Droste sings with such gravitas and remove that its easy to overlook how deliberately blank the lyrics are, and always have been. The profound trip-hop groove of opener Wasted Acres cant elide that all its about is riding a Honda TRX 250 ATV in a field. Throughout the record, words are just pathways through which the melody travels from one sweep to the next, but nothing really comes into focus except an almost free-floating regret and confusion. You can no longer feel the knife, but you can remember feeling it, in another decade, one just beginning to seem both self-defined and irretrievably lost.

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Review: Grizzly Bear Sort Out Their Old Lives on the Slinky, Satisfying Painted Ruins - SPIN