There’s a particular kind of record that doesn’t want to be understood so much as inhabited, and ‘An Excess of Hauntings’ is one of them. The second album from Adelaide’s The Only Objects, led by Patrick Lang, arrives less like a follow-up and more like a deliberate escalation — the sound of a band that finished saying what it had to say about itself and decided the only honest move left was to get weirder.

Where the group’s debut, ‘The Nostomanic Cypher’, worked the terrain of personal memory and identity, An Excess of Hauntings pushes outward into something closer to cultural haunting: lost futures, half-remembered timelines, the things that should have faded but insist on sticking around. It’s a smart pivot, and a risky one. Concept albums about ghosts are ten-a-penny; albums about what ghosts actually represent are rarer, and harder to pull off without tipping into pretension. Lang and producer Tim Whitt avoid that trap by refusing to let the record settle into one mode for long.

That restlessness is the record’s defining trait. Across its run, ‘An Excess of Hauntings’ moves through alternative rock, post-punk, prog, trip hop and electronics with the confidence of a band uninterested in genre loyalty — synths and samples sit next to free-jazz saxophone and banjo, with whole passages threatening to collapse into noise before pulling back at the last moment.

The opening title track begins with an ominous spoken word tale (from Alan Tully) with a kind of Scottish gothic horror in the delivery and a shimmering instrumentation in the ether: haunting feedback and reverb. It’s a fitting and chilling introduction – the following track ‘Access Will Be Retained’ is a more standard indie track framed by horns, a driving force and an anthemic delivery, almost subverted by a wandering jazzy interlude. There are elements of Depeche Mode dancing in a giddy whirl with Pink Floyd and something more wild and frenetic. The track detonates into genuine free-jazz chaos, the kind of moment that separates bands merely referencing weirdness from bands actually willing to sit inside it.

‘Isolated State’ pulls the tempo down into moody trip-hop territory and yet the passing sound of a banjo and ethereal backing vocals add a frisson. The track ebbs and flows in thrilling waves. ‘A Frozen Moment’ recalls elements of Floyd again: delicate and anthemic with an Antarctic chill while I cannot help thinking of a shoegaze blur delivered by The Verve at their best.

‘The Magnetbahn, Part I’ features a pulse-like throb throughout, underpinning washes of synths and spoken vocals. It features Wolfgang Flür — a member of Kraftwerk during the band’s most formative run. It’s a haunting spacious track that hangs in the skies like a constellation, glittering and immersive. The track segues into the epic, evolving ‘The Magnetbahn, Part II’ with its cinematic wash: another anthemic blast of sonic goodness with the passionate vocal delivery filled with drama and theatre.

‘The First Law’ reminds me a little of the legendary The Laughing Clowns with its indie jazz delivery, frenetic and wild, unhinged in the best way with just a touch of Sex Pistols and Nine Inch Nails and a punky eviscerating blast. By contrast, ‘Breaking Ground’ eases back into a lounge room groove, still framed by horns but all late night, red velvet lounged insouciance.

‘Stabilise’ does exactly what its title promises not to — a slow-motion structural collapse that’s one of the record’s most unsettling stretches. Pattering percussion gives it a nervous energy.

Final track instrumental ‘The Unending’ is a 21 minute final salute with a thousand yard stare, opening with, as the album began, an ominous air of shimmering synths glittering in the sky that stretches on, endlessly. The intensity builds but the synth wash mesmerises. The result is something elegiac and hypnotic that does as the title suggests: casts you off into eternity, and endless cycle.

The presence of Flür in this album could easily have been the kind of guest credit that overshadows everything else on a record like this. Instead it reads as a natural extension of the album’s whole premise: a genuine artefact of the electronic past turning up inside a record obsessed with the pull of the past on the present. It’s less a flex than a thesis statement.

What makes ‘An Excess of Hauntings’ feel like more than a collection of songs, though, is the object it arrives inside. The limited-edition art book, designed by longtime collaborator Jesse Miles with photography by light-painter Denis Smith, isn’t a booklet in any traditional sense — it’s a scattered set of narrative fragments the listener has to assemble themselves, with no correct order and no guaranteed resolution. It’s a fitting physical counterpart to an album about things that refuse to cohere into a tidy shape, and it pushes The Only Objects further into the territory of bands who treat the album-as-object as seriously as the album-as-audio.

None of this would land if the songwriting underneath it were thin, and it isn’t. There’s a confidence here that comes from a band who’ve already done the introspective record and know they don’t need to do it again — creativity does not have a use-by date, and ‘An Excess of Hauntings’ is proof that ambition doesn’t either. It’s a record that trusts its listener to do some of the assembling, both narratively and sonically, and it’s better for it.

Ultimately ‘An Excess of Haunting’ is an ambitious and immersive triumph, delivered with a profound confidence and elegance that makes it one of the most exciting and, yes, surprising albums of the year so far, from an outfit that wasn’t on my radar. And it is now.

‘An Excess of Hauntings’ is out nationally on Friday 28 August and available to download through the link above and here. The album will be performed in full at the Adelaide launch at Low Life Basement Bar on Friday 4 September, alongside Pink Noise Generator and Future Forest – tickets available here.

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