Stagg Hill’s staggering new collections of spacious, impactful anthems is a work of ambitious perfectionism given room to breathe. It’s a breathy album, saturated with synths and sounds and layered vocals rendered at once ethereal and grounded, with tones so rich you feel them in your chest, vibrating the air inside your lungs. Using steady repetition and simplistic progressions, the songs achieve a trancelike disassociation, building subconsciously into deeply affecting movements.

Bookended by two nearly ten-minute opuses “Wandering” and “Wandering, II,” the album seems intent to distance itself from traditional rock music, aligning instead with the ambient edge of post-rock. There are traces of Explosions in the Sky, but to my ear this is more in the tradition of Yo La Tengo’s quietly content long-form songs. They’re hushed and patient, but deliberately crafted, expertly performed, and impressively captured.

Stagg Hill uses synths and standard instrumentation to create a post-rock adjacent brand of Midwest indie. Traces of guitar effect noodlery hit at Collections of Colonies of Bees-style experimentation, as does the hypnotic repetition of most of the songs. Some twisting single-string riffing borrows from American Football’s legacy, and more than a couple movements hammer into a steady Krautrock rhythm, most notably in the giddy “Keeping Time.”

Tying it all together are lilting melodies overlaying the grandiose dynamics with levity, and a consistently lush sonic palette. The mix is truly glorious, warm and clean as a comforter fresh out of the dryer. The vocals are intimate and familiar, halfway between Elliott Smith and Ben Gibbard, with melodies that reach for major keys even as the music dawdles in the downtrodden. “Smoky Gorge” stands out as a stellar track among stellar tracks because it moves and evolves the most, from a gentle drift of a pop song into a fountain of catharsis.

There’s so much happening beneath the surface of Wondering it undermines the sonic landscape it builds and grows. It’s difficult to pin down exactly how much work went into making these songs. Based on the complexity and overall quality of the sounds, structures, and sequencing, it stands as a significant accomplishment to have put Wondering together so perfectly.