elvis depressedly stares straight into the void and airs their own blunt perceptions about it through their music, but it’s never been the band’s intentions to bring you down even if it says so right there in their name. Mathew Lee Cothran of Coma Cinema and Delaney Mills -- alongside a revolving cast of friends and collaborators -- have been taking the monoculture’s obsession with a dystopian world and turning it into their own wry joke in their homespun quarters of South Carolina from the very beginning. Since 2011, EPs and singles built with a bare necessity of instruments and production tools have recorded a memory box of self-healing guitar-pop laced with an Ambien trance, but with Cothran quitting his day job and resettling in Asheville, NC with Mills after the release of 2013’s Holo Pleasures to focus his efforts on their latest full-length new alhambra, an increased currency in time has resulted in elvis depressedly’s most definitive listen yet.

In many ways, new alhambra is an auditory homage to what has shaped lead singer Mathew Lee Cothran’s life. Its title, as any hardcore pro-wrestling fan will recognize, credits the Philadelphia arena that birthed its most legendary and extreme version of it, and the use of samples from wrestling shows serve as a reference to his upbringing. The album was characteristically made with outdated equipment and limited by only one microphone, with Mike "Dr. Vink" Roberts playing an essential role on bass that enrichens the rockier resonations in comparison to elvis depressedly’s previous releases. Cothran and Delaney were constantly on the move during the recording process thanks to their new found career freedom, but none of it takes away from new alhambra fully texturized shift toward brightly melancholic noise-pop inspired by Cothran’s favorite unsung heroes such as Waterboys, Prefab Sprout and Emperor X, and in more conventional instances, Elliott Smith and Mac DeMarco.

“There was a lot of uncertainty and I quit a job that I had had for 3 years but hated, and reacreativeadult.phplly kind of put it all on the line to make a record I really wanted to make. It was all a big risk,” says Cothran. That much is evident in the album’s centerpiece “Rock ‘N Roll” where his tongue quips at creativity’s value in the face of a greater stability. elvis depressedly may have gone for broke with their lives to make new alhambra the album it is, but their decision to do so proves to be well worth the end result, self-deprecatory pains and all.