“Love,” Percy Shelley wrote, is “the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative, and sensitive; and which, when individualized, becomes an imperious necessity.” “Love” is also the first word on Deerhoof’s latest album, whose title is drawn from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and it is the subject of the song they attempt to dream up on the concluding ‘Immigrant Songs’. The titular allusion to Frankenstein, however enigmatic, aligns with the album’s dense assortment of disparate elements, which seem to come alive even at its most mechanical and monstrous, but also its sensitivity to creatures that don’t match Captain Robert Walton’s description of Victor Frankenstein. Noble and Godlike in Ruin, the follow-up 2023’s Miracle-Level, is humanly messy in a way that feels defiant and, going by Percy Shelley’s holistic and visceral definition, rather lovely. If you subscribe to it, these songs might be for you.

1. Overrated Species Anyhow

Over a wild swirl of guitars, drums, and chirping sounds, the album’s opening track clarifies who these songs are for, or at least addressed to: “my savages,” “my aliens,” “my animals,” words Satomi Matsuzaki sings with complete tenderness. It immediately frames tha album as a political call, railing against dehumanization while declaring that the species asserting this power, in its most authoritative form – well, it’s not hard to come to the title’s conclusion. 

2. Sparrow Sparrow

‘Overrated Species Anyhow’ and ‘Sparrow Sparrow’ were released as a double-A single benefiting the Trevor Project, anonprofit suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth. The songs are not only inextricable but feed into one another, as if the disenfranchised beings addressed on the former are alerted and drawn to the band’s frantically intricate rhythms, simultaneously natural and unwieldy as they are. “Hope builds/ Inside of one/ Who suffers/ Who is alone,” Matsuzaki sings empathetically. A collective – a host, if you will – does too. 

3. Kingtoe

The first time I heard the refrain “I make machines/ And you are one,” I thought it was followed by “Unless you want.” It made me think of want as a human precondition, but ‘Kingtoe’ is naturally a little sillier, delightfully whimsical, but no less canny: twisting the meaning around – later it’s you making the machines – and teasing with every unless. A bio describes the record “cybernetic and deeply human,” but ‘Kingtoe’ is about their curious intersection, not contradiction. 

4. Return of the Return of the Fire Trick Star

Deerhoof is a band that always seems to be returning to something fundamental about themselves while breaking any sense of identity apart. Not that this has anything to do with ‘Return of the Return of the Fire Trick Star’, except that it is a classic-sounding Deerhoof song whose title alludes to a ceaseless cycle. First off: sick bass line. But then every other element – be it an eerie string section or funky guitar – arrives to elicit a strange mix of elation and gloom, as if to illustrate the blurred line the protagonist previously mentioned. Yet it’s also playfully nonsensical, its standout line being, “Raise me like a pretty buttercup.” 

5. Body of Mirrors

Noble and Godlike in Ruin continuously more firmly in an ominous direction with ‘Body of Mirrors’, which is also expansive enough to feel like a swerve from the immediacy (by Deerhoof standards) of the previous track. The production blows out a fantastical, enigmatic journey as if to crush it down to its core: the desire to go home, unfulfilled. 

6. Ha, Ha Ha Ha, Haaa

A Phonetics On and On for the Deerhoof universe, where ha replaces la and ba is a cheery bomb. Here, the record’s Frankenstein’s monster steps aside for the protagonist to compare herself to another creation yearning for acceptance: Pinocchio. There is too much happening on the song for the realization to bear a revelation, so the groove quickly mangles itself, leading to one of the noisiest passages on the album.  

7. Disobedience

What do you expect out of a Deerhoof song called ‘Disobedience’? Some kind of adherence to form? The song is a total maelstrom, though my favorite part is when it quiets down and the monster finds itself adrift, literally just screaming the word: “Adrift!” This cacophony does not suffice for Deerhoof, and the next one, fractured and grooveless, leaves an even bigger mark. It’s enough to drown out the closing spoken word passage, which feels like the point. 

8. Who Do You Root For?

The song is powered by a riff almost as mean as Matsuzaki’s lyrics, which address an “odious companion.” (“You’re not my companion,” she then clarifies.) Of course my savage sounds complimentary!

9. Under Rats [feat. Saul Williams]

Saul Williams matches Deerhoof’s freak – nay, free-jazz kineticism and climate anxiety – on ‘Under Rats’, wholly earning the album’s sole guest appearances. It’s more overt commentary on themes that have so far come up in rather oblique, elemental ways: “I may not be human/ But I know what every human know: being and becoming, fear and loving/ Eat, sleep, think, and grow.” There is a spikiness to the song that thrillingly brushes against its booming low end, not to mention its absurdly symphonic conclusion.

10. Immigrant Songs

A kind of sequel to ‘Exit Only’, a Deerhoof song that’s over ten years old, ‘Immigrant Songs’ is in the same vein as its predecessor in that it foregrounds the radical spirit that pervades, albeit metaphorically, the rest of the album, this time homing on Satomi’s experience as an immigrant in America. “This song we sing won’t be for you,” she sings. Looking at the song title, though, emphasize the plural: there are not only at least a couple songs stitched ferociously together here, but while the first brings forward the most “palatable” version of Deerhoof, the final section tears it all down. A freakout complete with “dalala”s nails the point home, in a language that you could never understand.