Despite its title, JOBS’ Soft Sounds is a full-spectrum sonic experience best played loud, one that crackles with clarity and urgency. The album represents a creative leap forward for the quartet, one that finds them fusing uniquely human gestures with precise repetition, creating an overall sound with distant echoes of folk songs, IDM, and 1970s jazz fusion.

Recorded during drummer Max Jaffe’s recording residency at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, the sessions coincided with significant life changes for each member of JOBS. Some moved across the US. Family formations grew, shrank, and shifted. All four members made moves in their own careers, musically and beyond. For bassist Ro Lundberg, this music also developed alongside an expanding view of their own gender, informing their contributions. Though the band arrived at these sessions with only a couple of guitarist Dave Scanlon’s melodies, Lundberg’s harmonic structures, and violist Jessica Pavone’s lines of lyrics, the sense of autonomy afforded by the residency allowed them to write, record, edit, and mix in a semi-concurrent flow state.

The idea of description creates a throughline across Soft Sounds. Lyrically, description and data dominate songs like parts 1 and 2 of “List The Creator Twice,” which meditate on the voyeuristic nature of description. “There is Differing” plays with and pushes English’s sometimes rigid language binary: around gender as well as the divide between the self and others. 

Throughout Soft Sounds, the sonic palette expands and contracts as each song sees fit. In JOBS’ music, Mark Hollis-type abstraction sits comfortably alongside grooves inspired by Jaffe’s time in Malawi. Their immersive sonic spaces suggest the speaker-test work of Ryoji Ikeda offset by soft-synth wobbles that recall an asexual reimagining of “brostep.” It’s in this reordering of the familiar and foreign that JOBS’ fluid approach reveals a sense of playful wonder and depth.