We’re getting old. Modest Mouse released “Float On” over 11 years ago. Listening to Strangers to Ourselves, Modest Mouse’s first album in six years, might make you feel like you’re back in 2004. Although it has several standout tracks, Modest Mouse has not changed its sound. Still, Strangers to Ourselves isn’t boring; rather, it ushers listeners through a carnival of echoing nostalgia and dark thoughts underneath a bright acoustic veneer.

The album opens with the eponymous song “Strangers to Ourselves,” a quiet, nostalgic track. As Isaac Brock softly sings, “How often we become susceptible to regret, I do regret,” it seems like the album might be a reflection on the changes that come with growing old.

But on the next track, “Lampshades on Fire,” Modest Mouse brings back their gritty, bright sound: “Well, this is what I really call a party now,” Brock cries, trading whispery nostalgia for crazed shouts. “Lampshades on Fire” has the same feeling of driving opti- mism as “Float On,” showing how little Modest Mouse has changed over the years. Still, it’s danceable and belligerently weird—Franz Ferdinand meets the Pixies.

On “Coyotes,” the band trades crunchy electric guitar for acoustic as Brock paints a picture of coyotes and ghosts tiptoeing around national parks. But the coyotes and ghosts are not the enemies here: “Mankind’s behavin’ like some serial killers, giant ol’ monsters afraid of the sharks.” Like many Modest Mouse songs, the bright melody disguises the grim implications of the lyrics.

With its refrain of “we don’t belong here, we were just born here,” “Pups to Dust” ad- dresses feelings of alienation that swim below the bright surface of the album. The song is followed by “Sugar Boats,” a darkly cartoonish track with honky-tonk piano, cascading guitar, and the proclamation that “this rock of ours is just some big mistake.”

Lyrics about change, or the lack thereof, link some of the tracks on what might otherwise seem like an overly eclectic album. “We remain the same, or pretty much the same,” sings Brock in “Pups to Dust.” Modest Mouse is pretty much speaking for its sound. While they have lost the sense of novelty they may have had in 2004, Modest Mouse is a band I don’t mind revisiting.