Dinosaur Jr. are nothing if not consistent, almost to a fault. It’d be easy to chock their good will up to the run of college rock classics they released in the late eighties and early nineties—though nothing else in their career has quite stood up to the trio of You’re Living All Over Me, Bug, and Green Mind, their nineties-and-beyond output has overall been of good-to-great quality. It’s clear that Mascis and co. know their strengths and can play to them with ease. There have been slight deviations from their original recipe for foggy, noisy pop-rock; their post-reunion records in particular have cleaned up a lot of their signature gunk, making way for spacier sounds. 2021’s Kurt Vile-assisted Sweep It Into Space took a dreamy, psych-country turn and ended up being the most revitalized the band had sounded in over a decade. But even, they still sounded like themselves at the core. Suffice to say, no Dino Jr. record has been a full reinvention, perhaps because none have needed to be. There Near is a good record because it’s a Dinosaur Jr. record, and it sounds like one—a latter day one that occasionally wades back into the sludge that made their early work so invigorating. The texture is still there, though it takes different shapes on a record that keeps J. Mascis’s vocals at the front of the mix while Murph and Lou Barlow thrash in the background, mirroring the record’s overall tone of distanced, measured reflection. Tracks like “Everything at Once” and “Gone Off” sound like wizened versions of the rickety bombast heard on You’re Living All Over Me. Both tracks embody There Near’s overarching feel of matter-of-fact acceptance. On the former, Mascis sounds resigned but not disappointed as he sings, “You don’t want my love,” as though he’s well settled into the acceptance stage of grief; on the latter, his weak points are unguarded among precision hits from Murph’s cymbals and snare: “I got lost, baby I got soft.” There are anxieties and confusions that one never outgrows, and thus must grow around. Mascis’ plainspoken admissions of these flaws and fears have become part of his narrative maturation on Dinosaur Jr.’s later-career records, and There Near is no exception. The slacker can age gracefully, not into a perpetually stunted manchild but into a sage observer of the world around him. Here, this manifests in delightfully odd, malaprop-adjacent Mascis-isms—that’s how you get “Clam Along.” Lou Barlow’s needlepoint-worthy advice on “Blowin’ Up” sounds straight from the front porch: “Mind your own teacup / Before you go breakin’ mine.” Other lines in the same song can’t help but clunk—Barlow sings the word “edgelord” like it’s a piece of slang he’s just learned and is desperate to put to use—but it’s otherwise one of the catchiest and most exciting songs on an otherwise pretty restrained record. The real freak-flag-flying moment comes on the closer, “No One’s Ready,” Barlow takes the lead once again. His chords are simple yet scorching, and paired with his ominous lead vocals, he sounds primed to charge into battle. The legacy band has added another solid entry into their vast catalog, maintaining the synergy that keeps longtime fans coming back, but it’s worth waiting till the end to find out that Dinosaur Jr. hasn’t run out of surprises just yet. [Jagjaguwar] Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.