OSEES, “Intercepted Message.”

There are certain things we’ve come to expect in the late summer: mostly short vacations, climate emergencies and back-to-school sales. But ’tis also the season for a new Osees album. Since 2003, John Dwyer and company have released at least one album per year, first as OCS, then The Ohsees, The Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, Oh Sees and now Osees. They’ve  skipped only 2021 in favor of Dwyer’s side project Moon Drenched.

Fans often assemble these albums in long sequences, so that like the images of man evolving from ape, we might witness the band’s eclectic procession from garage rock to punk, prog, new wave and all the various transit points between.

Intercepted Message, the band’s latest offering, tempers the lo-fi punk energy of 2022’s Metamorphosed with synthesizers and silliness. “The Fish Needs a Bike” begins with frontman/guitarist Dwyer exclaiming. “Stop! Fuck!” before the Captain Beefheart guitar groove kicks in and Dwyer begins singing “The fish needs a bike.” I figure he’s responding to the T-shirt my freshly divorced mom bought on our vacation to Washington, D.C. in 1984 that read, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” (Bono didn’t coin the phrase, either; it’s attributed to Australian educator Irina Dunn).

Some of the songs offer obvious, new influences. “Blank Chems” jerks with Devo attitude and vintage synth vibes. The album’s title track sounds like the British new wave group The Vapors (remember “Turning Japanese”?) after devolving in an isolation tank (remember “Altered States?”) and emerging in a drug lab.

Listeners will be hard-pressed to find a single polysyllabic word in all of Dwyer’s lyrics. Instead, he barks like a dog at the end of his leash. Except on “Submerged Building,” where, in a seizure of hyperbole, he sings, “It’s just happenstance, surely there’s no great romance from long ago.”

Many of the songs are complicated musical mosaics assembled from extensive jamming into short, tightly structured songs, and in this way the album most closely resembles Osees’ 2019 release, Face Stabber. “Stunner,” with its complicated twin guitar harmonies and proggy noodling, is the most obvious example.

“Die Laughing” combines the off-kilter funk of Miles Davis’ 1972 album On the Corner — replete with shortwave radio transmitter noise — with the Krautrock vocal mutterings of CAN or Faust. “Sleazoid Psycho” matches Cure-like moodiness with Devo’s pop sensibilities and Frank Zappa’s anti-musical aesthetics.

But the album really takes a turn for its final two songs. When “Always at Night” begins to ooze from the speakers, you may think something is wrong with your stereo. The song’s lush synthesizers and pop aesthetic sound like Spandau Ballet or Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (remember Napoleon Dynamite dancing with Deb?). The schmaltzy vocals offer up cliches like, “When we’re apart, baby, I kinda lose my mind.”

It’s weird, and complicated by the fact that it’s a pretty good song, even with its tongue planted firmly in cheek.

The album’s closer, “Ladwp Hold,” riffs on the music you hear on hold with the IRS. A slightly stoned-sounding automated voice explains, “Your call is super duper important to us,” as the elevator music glitches into oblivion.

Cool, see you next year.

Follow writer David Gill at Twitter.com/songotaku.