Mystery Jets Search for Light on ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’

Mystery Jets’ seventh album, A Hole To See The Sky Through, is built around the idea of searching for light. The title track and “Godrays” gesture toward seeing a rainbow through thunder, a theme that suggests emotional payoff. But listening to the record often requires the same patience it describes.

The band’s previous album, A Billion Heartbeats, carried an urgent, politically charged edge. The new one rarely matches that intensity, and it doesn’t recapture the charm of earlier material like 2008’s “Two Doors Down.” Instead, many tracks drift into comfortable, mid-tempo grooves. “Long Lonely Road” takes the shape of a slow-burn Motown number without the energy that made that sound work. “Anaglypta,” an attempted Springsteen-style epic, gets tangled in overwrought phrasing, including a line about silos, sanatoriums and cinemas that sits awkwardly against the melody.

There are still flashes: “Black Sage” bristles with fuzzed-out riffs and glittery synths, while “Flea Joint” and “Godrays” recall the brighter, arms-aloft energy of the band’s Serotonin era. The album has warmth, but its search for light settles too often into a haze that doesn’t linger.