James Mercer and Danger Mouse are first-class astral geeks. And on last year's Broken Bells, the Shins frontman and the hip-hop surrealist came up with melancholic psychedelic folk hop - somewhere between Pet Sounds and De La Soul Is Dead. This EP suggests their one-off is a full-on "project." Mercer rolls out bright, mussy melodies and turns up his guitar a little, and D.M. decks out his tunes with elegiac surf guitar, computer funk and clouds of candy noise — it's otherworldly but still heart-tugging. "The oddity is aching," Mercer sings; it could be a Bells-tour T-shirt slogan, though these guys seem happiest in their studio bunker.

Listen to "Meyrin Fields":  
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“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.”