You can feel it from the opening notes of the first song; and it doesn’t matter if you’re intimately familiar with BOYS NIGHT OUT or you’ve never heard the Burlington, Ontario, group’s music before now. From the second the band’s sophomore album, Trainwreck, opens, with its cascading instrumental overture and its eerie voice-over of a physician diagnosing his patient, you can sense the arrival of something big, powerful—and where this band is concerned, previously unexplored.

The album started as a story the guitarist, Jeff Davis, had written—a typically dark yet surprisingly empathetic tale of love, murder, mental anguish and creative reawakening—then became the catalyst for the album they’d start writing. Now, that story has been broken down into 12 sections, which are Trainwreck’s 12 songs. The metallic, mathy, prog-rock dynamics of “Dreaming” set the album’s tone early on, their dark, descending guitar lines eerily complementing the physical and emotional collapse of the patient at the center of the album’s story. At the same time, longtime fans should feel right at home with songs like “Medicating,” which put the guitar harmonies, handclaps and sing-along choruses of classic BNO into a thrilling new context. Yes, Trainwreck is the album where these Boys officially grow up, the disc where their hopes, ambitions and darkest secrets collide to make the statement they’ve always had in them.
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