Perhaps it’s just a strange coincidence that the leader of the Drin bears a name that reads like a stage-alias mash-up of two of the most iconic artists of the 1960s. But while Dylan McCartney’s band deploys a brand of sinister, post-industrial psych-rock that doesn’t feel reverentially retro, his artistic ethos could best be described as a case of Dylan vs. McCartney: He’s both the ragged raconteur gazing wearily out at our cruel world, and the ambitious, console-savvy alchemist seeking to transcend it.

Since launching the Drin with a home-recorded cassette in the pandemic-clouded summer of 2020, McCartney has effectively built the project into a Buckeye State version of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. His prolific rate of output mirrors Anton Newcombe’s mid-’90s hot streak and occupies a similarly fluid position on the spectrum between jangle and drone, replacing BJM’s California-cult aura with a hardened Rust Belt resilience. McCartney has since surrounded himself with a proper six-piece band, simultaneously sustaining membership in fellow Cincinnati-scene pillars the Serfs and Crime of Passing. But all the while, the Drin have stayed true to his original mandate, tapping a deep well of record-collector touchstones (from classic and kosmiche rock to post-punk and dub to goth and neofolk) and reanimating them with a contemporary sense of unease—nostalgia as a gateway to dystopia.

For an industrious artist like McCartney, a double album is less a dramatic level-up than an inevitability. Clocking in at 23 songs and 75 minutes, I Lost My Way for Centuries is certainly the Drin’s most sprawling statement to date, but it’s also the most accessible on-ramp into McCartney’s psyche. And for such a wide-ranging record, there’s remarkably little fat. They don’t pad the tracklist with extended noise experiments or free-form jams; rather, each track functions as a challenge to work within compact pop-song parameters while still retaining the band’s improvisatory, wandering spirit. McCartney’s densely layered approach remains, but instead of plunging his melodies into a murky pool of doomy basslines, lo-tech electronics, and dubbed-out tape manipulations, he weaves thick tapestries from mostly organic instrumentation: guitars, drums, brass, shakers, and the occasional bouzouki.

No matter what form the Drin take—renaissance-faire folkies (“...And They All Strummed”), garage-quaking neanderthals (“Cannery Action”), harmonica-honking Harvest agrarians (“Moths to the Light”), motorik-powered space-rockers (“The Cell”)—McCartney’s voice serves as the band’s anchor, with a Sonic Boom-schooled sing-speak that oozes attitude and ennui in equal measure. But if McCartney is the omnipresent main character, saxophonist Eric Dietrich is the Drin’s resident scene stealer. In psych-punk contexts, the sax is often deployed as an agent of chaos, but Dietrich wields his more subtly and seductively, gradually changing the vibe of a song even when every other element stays the same. “The Sky Has Lost the Smile” may begin as an exercise in rock-history revisionism—what if CCR wrote “I Wanna Be Your Dog”?—but Dietrich’s heady horn lines launch it out of the swamp and toward the skies. And within the otherwise menacing fuzzed-out grind of “Prophets of Doom,” he slips in snake-charmer melodies that expedite McCartney’s Elias Rønnenfelt-like transformation from goth misanthrope to swaggering rock star. When McCartney shouts, “It’s not a mistake/I was born too late/It’s just my fate,” he conjures visions of Richard Ashcroft in his untamed, barefoot, storm-chasing days.

That sense of doom-generation discontent has long featured in the Drin’s music, but on I Lost My Way for Centuries, McCartney sounds like he’s having more of a good time singing about the bad times—or as one delightfully dazed track puts it, he’s all about “the sweet, sweet music of decline.” With “Spent,” he gives us a modern-day update of Iggy Pop’s “I’m Bored,” but sets it to a chill dub rhythm that seems to wash all his frustrations away. “Bozo Theatre” paints a portrait of a proud shut-in by channeling the whimsical influence of psych-rock’s most famous recluses—Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee—and delivering the jolliest chorus hook in McCartney’s canon. And, in perhaps the greatest leap beyond the Drin’s grimy post-punk roots, the gorgeous guitar soloing that’s drizzled all over the rainy-day dream-pop serenade “I’m Not the Door” hits the untapped sweet spot between Durutti Column’s “Sketch for Summer” and the Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky.” But if there’s an organizing principle for the Drin’s eclectic aesthetic, it’s found in the mod-busker bounce of “Come and See V3,” where McCartney defiantly declares, “In hard times, I will create!” For the Drin, the double-album expanse of I Lost My Way for Centuries is both an artistic luxury and a survival mechanism.