8/10

The first full-length album from Utopia PKWY, the new project led by John Beckmann of The Mortal Prophets, moves away from the darker atmosphere of his previous work and into something warmer, brighter and more openly melodic. It's not a complete reinvention so much as a shift in weather, with psychedelic pop, synth-wave textures and art-rock strangeness replacing some of the shadow and unease.

Beckmann steps away from lead vocals here, with Tanner McGraw and Lawson Mars helping give the songs a lighter and more youthful emotional centre. Their presence makes the album feel more outward-looking, while Beckmann's production still keeps everything slightly off-kilter.

Chrome-coloured keyboards, warped hooks, theremin, sitar and layered synth textures give the record a deliberately surreal edge, but 'Debut' rarely loses sight of melody. The album can be strange without becoming remote, and psychedelic without dissolving into pure atmosphere.

'If I Could Steal One More Kiss' is a strong example of this approach. Built around memory, desire and emotional transformation, the song has a loose, groovy quality that suits his more colourful approach. Its romanticism is slightly unstable, never quite allowing nostalgia to become sentimental, and that tension runs throughout much of the record.

Elsewhere, tracks such as 'Sleep In Moving Colors', 'Nothing Is Missing' and 'I Knew You Were Trouble' help establish the album's central world of youthful longing, reinvention, escape and the strange mythology people build around memory.

Inspired by Utopia Parkway in Queens and its association with surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, the album shares some of Cornell's fascination with assembling private worlds from ordinary objects, memories and fragments. Beckmann approaches pop in a similar way, taking familiar materials and arranging them into something slightly unfamiliar.

It makes 'Debut' feel less of a clean break from The Mortal Prophets than a parallel universe. The intellectual curiosity remains, as does Beckmann's interest in texture and atmosphere, but here the songs move with more lift and immediacy.

Utopia PKWY hasn't been created to abandon the shadows. It simply discovers what they look like in a late-afternoon light.