Since forming in high school, Brisbane band The Goon Sax – the trio of Riley Jones, Louis Forster, and James Harrison, best friends who take turns writing, singing, and playing each instrument – have been celebrated for their unpretentious, kinetic homemade pop.

Mirror ll, The Goon Sax’s third album, is something else entirely: a new beginning, a multi-dimensional eclectic journey of musical craftsmanship that moves from disco to folk to no wave with staggering cohesion. Gone are the first-person insecurities of their school days – they’ve been made expansive, more universal, more weird.

Mirror II is released by Chapter Music in Australia/New Zealand, and the legendary Matador Records for the rest of the world.

On their debut album, 2016’s Up to Anything, it was their candid affection and scrappy instrumentation that drew praise. On 2018’s We’re Not Talking they were exalted for massive choruses, a sharpening of their craft, and the addition of horns, strings and castanets to their guitar/bass/drums.

Mirror ll is the result of three years of writing, and some considerable time spent apart: Louis relocated to Berlin and worked at a cinema (he sings in German on the track “Bathwater”), Riley and James formed an angular post-punk band called Soot. All three experimented with abstract, atonal sounds before recapturing the essence of The Goon Sax: “pop melody,” Louis explains. “The first two albums are inherently linked. They had three- word titles; they went together. This one definitely felt like going back to square one and starting again, and that was really freeing.”

“We lived in a share house together, this tiny little Queenslander we called ‘Fantasy Planet,’ where we wrote the album,” Riley says. “We were able to go to each other’s rooms and say anything that came to mind and go to the practice room three times a week. It was pretty intense.”

The band traveled to Bristol to record the album at Invada Studios, owned by Geoff Barrow of Portishead, with producer John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius). Parish himself says “the different styles and characteristics of Louis, Riley, and James complement each other so well, and result in a sound that is uniquely their own.”

Mirror II is the sum of everything that has always made The Goon Sax great: robust talk-singing, lyrical candor, ascending guitar pop structures, all elevated into newfound expansiveness and sonic experimentation.