New York City’s Forest Fire, led by vocalistsongwriter Mark Thresher, return this fall with Screens With their third full-length, Forest Fire - now the quartet of Thresher, Natalie Stormann, Galen Bremer, and Robert Pounding - have found it. “It” has been hinted at in previous releases the howling languor of “Slow Motion”, from the band’s debut Survival - but Screens is pure lightning After some lineup adjustments that left the band leaner and morecentered, Forest the first time they’d worked with an outside engineer in a proper studio to uncoil sonic possibilities they’d before only touched on, and to enable their new songs to breathe and stretch out.

That stretching out is quite literal in the case of album centerpiece “Annie,” an elevenminute track that is wide but not sprawling, buoyed by motorik lope and ornate synths, grounded by vocal spits and hisses. The song exemplifies the atmosphere of a record that the band acknowledges owes a debt to the late ‘70s output of not only Kraftwerk but Yoko Ono, Joy Division, Laurie Anderson, and their ilk; Sandy Skoglund’s iconic 1977 photograph Pink Sink is the cover.