Allah-Las // Sirenas

On Sirenas, Allah-Las sound less interested in refining their established style than seeing how far they can wander from it. The Los Angeles quartet’s sixth album is largely instrumental and unusually open-ended, emerging from improvisation rather than tightly mapped-out songs. That freedom gives the record a restless personality. “Snakes of Hydra” slips into a loose disco pulse, “Vini da Gama” locks guitars into a wiry motorik pattern, and “Muzzy” roughens the edges with blown-out garage rock. Elsewhere, “Ultramarine” leans into chunky synthesizers while “Caldera II” slows everything down into a muted, melancholy drift. Clay Finch’s flute appears throughout, sometimes softening the music and sometimes making its stranger passages feel stranger still. The common thread is less a particular sound than Allah-Las’ willingness to follow an idea before worrying about where it belongs. Their longstanding affection for psychedelic rock remains, but Sirenas opens that vocabulary toward krautrock, ambient music, new age, dubby rhythm, and instrumental pop without turning any one influence into the album’s defining feature. Even “Pt. Conception,” one of the record’s easiest grooves, feels like a jumping-off point rather than a destination. Sirenas is a curious, pleasantly unruly record, one that finds Allah-Las loosening their grip on what an Allah-Las album is supposed to sound like and discovering that uncertainty suits them.