Foxing’s 2015 album Dealer dealt with Catholic guilt, self-medicating PTSD, prayers for dead grandparents, and devastating tour burnout, but one theme weighed on the St. Louis band most heavily: “Can we please make some money doing this?” Foxing makes knotty, quietly devastating rock music that can’t be easily categorized as post-rock, indie rock, or even emo; even if they wanted to sell out, who are the buyers? So there’s humorous subtext when Conor Murphy sings “I’d sell my soul to be America’s pool boy/The crown centerfold” on the ecstatic title track of upcoming album Nearer My God. It’s first Foxing song that could possibly make that a reality. But there’s no irony here.

As if just hit by a spotlight he’d been waiting on, Murphy shouts “I want it all!” and with “Nearer My God” the band fully commits to laser-lit synth-rock that can go moonshot for moonshot with M83 and the 1975. It’s a sensible and spectacular way of hitting the same knee-buckling emotional peaks (“Unfollowing my dead friends/Someone’s gonna love me”) that could occasionally get muffled by their complicated orchestrations of the past. This all-consuming need for validation is not exclusive to musicians—when Murphy yells “does anybody want me at all,” it speaks to anyone in crippling debt, financial or otherwise.