Wilco Sound Their Best in Years on Hot Sun Cool Shroud

“Hot Sun” cracks open the EP like a beating sun busting up tarmac. Wilco haven’t had an opening track this affecting since “Either Way” 18 years ago. It’s summer hardware that pesters your skin like July’s claustrophobic swelter. A backline of synthesizers hugs the set like an orchestra, as Wilco bounce between catchy, melodic singalong and jagged, fleeting breakdowns. It recalls the density of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, mirroring how, despite featuring so many obvious moving parts, nothing sounds overrought or unneeded. A bass throbs here, a snare drum pattern hits with a texture perfect for pillowing Tweedy’s delivery of the “Ice, glassy ice, tumble in my plastic glass / Shouldn’t I be doing something? What can I do?” chorus. The melody segues quickly into a mangled lead guitar riff backed by a simmering, long-held rhythm chord.

The instrumental “Livid,” albeit a minute long, begins with a riff that sounds like a garage rock band trying to rip off AC/DC’s “Beating Around the Bush”—and it works because Tweedy and the gang sound absolutely mad despite the track’s brevity. It’s the kind of composition that has serious staying power, if only because Wilco could absolutely transform it into an epic onstage jam. “Livid” sounds like the product of Tweedy’s fixation on his Replacements and Minutemen roots. “Inside the Bell Bones,” another instrumental, takes a much more experimental approach than we’ve heard from Wilco in a long, long time—as if it was destined to subvert any expectations the band has garnered since beginning the dBpm era 13 years ago. The track, too, sounds like it was written with the intention of showcasing Glenn Kotche’s percussion talents, as Tweedy and Cline’s string work takes a backseat to Kotche’s drumming. Though it clocks in at less than two minutes in length, “Inside the Bell Bones” arrives like the early resounds of what could be an entire record’s tone and direction.

“Ice Cream” is the album’s slow-burn song, but it is beautifully compelling. When he’s not comparing himself to a melting dessert treat, Tweedy sings compassionately about expectations and abandonment through the lens of spirituality. “I didn’t know if I could be true enough to be a Bible,” he bemoans. “You held me up, never looked inside. You’d seen enough to leave me behind, for someone else to find.” “Ice Cream” is a choice example of Tweedy’s tectonic abilities as a songwriter, and it brings to mind some of his solo projects, especially WARM—but with an added delicacy from Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansone. Closing track “Say You Love Me” is the best alt-country offering Wilco have cooked up in years, and it would have fit perfectly on Summerteeth. It’s gentle until it’s not, as Tweedy’s Ode to Joy-era singing remains romantic and airy when the band kicks the arrangement into a higher tempo—the first verse is an especially bittersweet triumph, arriving soft like a valentine before drawing the curtain back on a performance underscored solemnly by droning strings. “Once you’re born, a single drop of sun—a ray of light—holds you in its arms,” Tweedy sings. “Once you’re gone, you shine on in your friends and then everyone you love hears your voice within.”

Hot Sun Cool Shroud is full steam ahead by the time it dissolves into “Annihilation”—Wilco’s strongest song in years. The band unvault jangly guitars dressed up with an industrialized poppiness; Tweedy plays rhythm, holding down the song’s foundation while Cline turns his six-string up and conjures the elements that haunted every turn of A Ghost is Born. Hot Sun Cool Shroud succeeds at amplifying numerous eras of Wilco’s career, and “Annihilation” is a modern-day epilogue to a five-year run that ended nearly two decades ago. It’s an exclamation point on a band that can oscillate between down-on-your-luck balladry and garage rock cut up by alien sampling without skipping a note. “Annihilation” sounds like a blistering sun—it sweats and it gouges and it bruises. The song, at once, throbs like a headache while professing a kinetic sense of hope from within. “Hey, we’re boiling angels,” Tweedy sings out. “Let’s kiss for hours, equal power. Let’s make it art.” It’s the kind of desire that’s too sweet to neglect, told in-between Cline’s guitar solos rippling like wind running through a silk dress but ripping through the fabric. If Cousin suggested that Wilco’s focus was beginning to wane, then Hot Sun Cool Shroud is Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansone all snapping back into pattern.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.