Punching the Clown begins with a gently strummed acoustic and a sweet, twanging banjo. In a limpid, world-weary voice, Kurt Wagner explains, “I’m a human calculator, and I never make mistakes.” That line is challenged by the next one: “And I’ve been smoking like a Russian cosmonaut,” which comes lined in gravel and Emersonian masculinity. And then a “LAMBCHOP NEW SHIT!” vocal tag thuds into the mix, the voice glitched and rough like Kid Capri in DAMN., breaking the spell. “Just West of Nicollet” is strange and silly and Wagnerian in a way that jolts the listener out of the soporific drawl of mundane living and into the mire that is Lambchop’s seventeenth album. It’s been over thirty years since Wagner’s band’s debut. In that time, they’ve produced a steady stream of critically revered albums that span countless shapes and genres. 2022’s The Bible was Auto-Tune-heavy, death-obsessed, and altogether excellent. Despite their frequent sonic shifts, Lambchop’s quality is so consistent and their musicianship is so natural that they sometimes risk fading into the background of the music industry, which thrives on drama and change. Wagner can be forgiven, then, for the screamed interjection in Punching the Clown’s intro, a Bible-like non-sequitur that rebels against this album’s softest promises. Punching the Clown is gentle, unhurried, and exact. An acoustic guitar and that aforementioned banjo—played by none other than Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—make up the majority of the album’s instrumentation, with the occasional percussive accent or whisper-soft synth. That elemental sparseness, a Vernon specialty, was dreamt up at the singer’s Wisconsin studio alongside producer Ryan Olson. Punching the Clown’s starkness leaves room for its defining aspect: its choir. Well, actually, its two choirs. Using a Baptist form of call-and-response called lined-out singing, the Eau Claires Vocal Sextet and the London Choir provide the album its backbone, rising to become the LP’s main instrument in its second half. On “Weakened,” which well encapsulates the defeat ringing throughout the album, the groups rise and combine to take over the song’s latter half. The religious ambiance they create is impossible to shake. Ditto on “To Do,” which begins near-Gregorian in the depth of its vocals. An ethereal gospel choir is brought down to earth by the bluntness of Wagner’s storytelling. On the title song, he sings, “I’m overweight / You’re overwhelmed.” Later, he turns the phrase “What the fuck?” into a hymnal. At times, he smashes emotions into pieces with fourth-wall breaks. “Wow, it just got moody,” he mourns on “The New World Wave,” a family saga of epic proportions and Punching the Clown’s emotional center. One song is simply called “White People,” and its refrain makes up much of the lyricism. Multiple times, Wagner invokes an absent God, less out of expectation than resigned habit: “Those Roman Catholics think they’re fantastic,” he grumbles on “White People.” God here is an apophatic figure; the only true religion present on the album is the communal hum lingering behind the band. The brusqueness of Wagner’s delivery allows him to express power lyrically rather than vocally, in brief admissions of despair. On “Afterburner,” he sighs, “We’re so broke / We can’t even pay attention,” before making a joke about a “dumbotron.” Wagner’s openness, combined with soft, holy dejections of emptiness, build Punching the Clown up to be a monument to a failed America. With Vernon’s banjo beneath him, he sings about “bedtime stories for the unemployed” in “The New World Wave” and salutes the health of migrant workers in “Cigar.” Wagner plays the role of an all-American elder playing un-American songs with ease, writing about showbiz delusions and movie-plot parallels. But it’s human connection that emerges as the unlikely hero in the album’s greatest moments. On “To Do,” Wagner promises to “paint a picture and have it come out looking like you” before he hits the afterlife. There’s comfort, he argues, in art that America cannot provide. Even at its quietest, Punching the Clown is brightened by a band and the strange, unspoken unity of its musicians. In a world that has given Wagner plenty of reasons to despair, Lambchop trades his malaise for something rarer than optimism: each other. [Merge] Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.