For the better part of the last two decades, Britt Daniel has established partial residence for Spoon in a parallel universe very close to our own. If not quite "a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind…both shadow and substance," then it’s about as close as American indie rock gets to it. Spoon often sounds like other bands—as revealed earlier this year, that’s part of their point—but there’s always something a bit different, a bit unsettling. In 2010 Daniel finally gave a name to the emotional and sonic wormhole he’s long located: "The Mystery Zone". That’s the space-time twist that holds "The times that we met/ Before we met," those wobbly, resonant left-handed piano chords and the screams that cut off mid-word. The Mystery Zone is where ghosts linger, where Everything Hits at Once, and what freezes the "walking through the door" climax of "Metal Detektor".

On the band’s eighth album They Want My Soul, we first enter the Mystery Zone on "Inside Out". After being transported by a sustained, echo-laden organ note that accompanies us to the other side, Daniel tells us what he sees and feels, not unlike Rod Serling introducing a "Twilight Zone" episode: "Time's gone inside out/ Time gets distorted with/ This intense gravity." Now that James Murphy’s retired, Daniel is indie rock’s preeminent sensitive sound-synthesist, and of course "Inside Out" is about trying to understand the laws of attraction: "There’s intense gravity in you/ I’m just your satellite," he mewls, while trippily chewing scenery with far-off echoes, synth washes, and, yes, harp glissandos. In a more conventional setting, Side B rocker "Let Me Be Mine" takes us to the Mystery Zone via his long-held fascination with emotional memory. Daniel begs someone to "auction off what you love/ It will come back sometime." On the sleek punk closer "New York Kiss", a dramatic liplock is "just another place/ a place that your memory owns."

But why soul? One way to think of the term in the rock realm is as code for "authenticity," and such signifiers are all over the album—"Rent I Pay" and the title track are both fierce, swag-laden diatribes against incorporation into The Machine. But Daniel’s always been interested in the Mystery Zone idea of soul, too—what the Ancient Greeks called our post-mortem "shade in the underworld." When Daniel sings "time keeps on going when/ we got nothing else to give," he's reminding us of exactly this.

While countless bands wander around in fugue states, repurposing what made them successful without any memory of how or why they got there, Spoon have long turned their success inside out. Daniel and Jim Eno’s ultra-rare combination of inventiveness and consistency situated the band in the "yawn, another great album from these guy"” status way back on 2005’s Gimme Fiction. In the decade hence, epitomized on They Want My Soul, they simply make Spoon Albums that still manage to unsettle our expectations about how indie rock music should sound. Maybe this is Spoon’s greatest trick: the only band to make listeners wonder if they’re the ones in the Mystery Zone, after all. —Eric Harvey