Seventeen songs. Less than forty minutes. One hell of a trip. Universe Room, the new album from Guided By Voices, is a wild, sprawling ride that refuses to stay in one lane. It's the band’s eighteenth album in just ten years, a true sign of Robert Pollard’s tireless creativity. But this time, even longtime fans might find themselves caught off guard by its unpredictability.

This isn’t just another lo-fi indie rock gem from Dayton’s finest, however. Universe Room feels like a restless, kinetic explosion of ideas, a jukebox of sounds that veers between high-fidelity and basement tape grit with reckless abandon. Song structures are fluid, shifting underfoot like quicksand. Choruses appear and vanish, riffs dissolve before they settle, and melodies morph into something entirely unexpected before you can latch onto them. If Guided By Voices have always been about immediacy, this album pushes that ethos to the extreme.

“I wanted to create, hopefully, an experience, kind of a wild ride,” said Pollard, ever the rock ’n’ roll visionary. “Where the listener would want to hear it multiple times in order to grasp all the sections and fields of sound - to discover something new with each listen.” Well then… mission accomplished!

By cutting away repetition and keeping song segments fleeting, the album plays like a rock n’ roll fever dream. Each song opens a door to a different world - sometimes lo-fi and ramshackle, sometimes soaring with unexpected clarity - before slamming it shut and hurtling into the next. This is Guided By Voices at their most experimental, a band unafraid to ditch the map and wander into parts unknown.

At this stage in their career, Pollard and company could easily rest on their legendary status. Instead, Universe Room proves they’re still searching, still evolving. It’s an album that needs repeat listens, each spin revealing a new fork in the path. Guided By Voices may have been at this for decades, but Universe Room is proof they’re still finding new ways to surprise and keep fans excited.