This album is a spectacular gamble: two 15-minute alternative-country operettas of heartbreak autopsy, written in whiplash sequences of hope, breakdown and fragile resolution and scored with twang and bluegrass-style harmonies. It's as if Jeff Tweedy was writing for Wilco while still in Uncle Tupelo, with opera on his mind and a stopwatch in his hand. Nick Shattell is a direct composer ("There’s no God where I've gone/There's no saints where I’ve been"), and the band brakes and bolts with earthy aplomb. Not an Airplane have made other records, but this one is so bold and accomplished, it feels like a debut.

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• Photos: Random Notes

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”