For a while, Dirty Projectors were a Brooklyn daydream. What started as the dorm room project of eventual Yale dropout Dave Longstreth eventually morphed into a six-piece band leading the Williamsburg brigade with Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, and TV On the Radio right beside them. Of these groups, Longstreth’s was the most audacious, the most actively experimental—spawning from the principal songwriter’s early days as a music major focusing in on classical music.

What we never realized, though, was that Dirty Projectors always was and always would be Longstreth’s band. The group has rotated around him, and he’s bent its various members to his indomitable and at times overbearing will. When he and Coffman broke up sometime after the release of 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan, that was it for the band. Longstreth disappeared for five years, only to re-emerge with a solo record that revealed uncomfortable details about his feelings towards Coffman. It was aggressively honest at best, vengeful at worst (“What I want from art is truth/What you want is fame”), and its not quite coherent sound resulted in Longstreth’s weakest effort since Dirty Projectors became a band.

Dirty Projectors started as a Longstreth solo project, the DIY wanderings of a folk-leaning collagist, pulling parts from every genre imaginable and pasting them beneath his warbly, nervous voice. When he got to Brooklyn, he lived with the dudes from Vampire Weekend and began to play with them, as well as current Dirty Projectors bassists Nat Baldwin and a few collaborators who would come and go. By the time Longstreth was gearing up to record Rise Above, his re-imaging (from memory) of Black Flag’s music, he recruited Amber Coffman to join the band, in addition to drummer Brian McOmber. To tour that record, Angel Deradoorian hopped aboard, and what was once the wild, unhinged musings of a man with endless talent, became one of the most exciting bands in the world.

After a long gap of half a decade between Swing Lo Magellan and Longstreth’s 2017 solo release, he’s returned again, just a year later, this time with a full band, to release Lamp Lit Prose. Bassist Nat Baldwin has returned to the group, as has drummer Mike Johnson, but the women who arguably helped Longstreth pioneer the sound his band’s most known for, its harmonies, have been replaced. Now singing for the group are Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Kristin Slipp. Throughout Longstreth’s fifteen year career as Dirty Projectors, it’s become clear that we works best when he has musicians to write for. With a new band in tow, Lamp Lit Prose is a return to form. Now living in LA, Longstreth is a far cry from the musician who surprisingly sprung the enthralling Bitte Orca onto an already saturated Brooklyn scene. But now he’s back with a new army of ultra-talented musicians to write wonderfully colorful songs for. Some things never change.

So You Want To Get Into: Rock Your Face Off Dirty Projectors

This is the best iteration of Dirty Projectors because Longstreth’s long-winded meanderings get sliced to their most concise declarations, featuring monstrous drums, jittery bass, and guitar lines that jump from point A to point Q without considering such a leap audacious or even out of the ordinary. When Longstreth’s compositions are vaulting out of your speakers, it’s because of the drums. His drummers have cycled from Adam Forkner to Brian McOmber to his current drummer, Mike Johnson. The sweet spot of this era lands between 2007 and 2009, when Longstreth surrounded himself with a full band, creating the most cohesive version of Dirty Projectors—able to accurately and precisely convey Longstreth’s wildest ramblings without ever having to reign them in.