This is not a review of Brand New’s Science Fiction

When you wait eight years for something good, you want it to pay off. You want it to be worth the wait, you want those years spent anxiously wringing your hands to culminate in something like joy.

Eight years since Daisy. And finally, in a flurry of activity and guesswork and desperate searches for links, it’s here. Science Fiction. The fifth Brand New album, and most likely — if the band itself is to be believed — their last.

It’s a long exhale when you’re holding your breath for that long, but the exhale doesn’t last long because the minute Jesse Lacey’s voice kicks in on “Lit Me Up,” you realize this is it, this is the last time you’ll be listening to a new album by your favorite band and you suck that breath back in again because you just basically punched yourself in the gut with that thought, knocked the wind out of yourself.

But here it is. You’re listening to it. You’re finally, really listening to a new full-length Brand New album and you can’t believe. The first listen-through is raw emotions. Each note, each drum beat and key change and harmony soars through you and you find it hard to grasp them all so you just let the album play out, listening to it as if in a dream state.

When it finishes, when the dizzyingly beautiful “Batter Up” finishes, you start it again and this time it takes hold. You note how the album as a whole is an ode in some way to each of the four albums that came before it. You hear the call-backs, you listen to the similarities and you think, they’ve done it again. They’ve grown and changed and yet stayed the same.

You listen again and fight with yourself about what your favorite song is. Is it “Can’t Get It Out” with its scream of “I’m just a manic depressive?” Is it “Same Logic?” But then “In the Water” comes around again and you think that’s it, until “451” loads up.

And you know. You know you’ll be listening to nothing but this for weeks on end, you know it’s your favorite album of the year, even though you just finished listening to the new Manchester Orchestra for the 100th time and even though the new Queens of the Stone Age hasn’t come out yet, you just know. This is it.

Is this going to take the place of Devil and God as your favorite Brand New album? Possibly. Maybe it’s the heady rush talking. Maybe it’s the newness of it all, maybe it’s the adrenaline talking, but you’re sure this is the best thing they’ve ever done — musically, lyrically, thematically. Your head is buzzing as you listen again, your heart doing double time because you can’t believe it. They’ve pulled it off. It’s the master heist of your emotions. You’re dying. Dead. Rest in peace.

Eight years. And this is the payoff. You cry as you listen because it’s been so long, because it will never happen again, because you have the emotional capacity of 14 year old right now. You’re a grown woman, god damn it, stop crying.

No.

If Science Fiction is Brand New’s legacy, if this is what makes them god-like to people who aren’t already in the cult, if this is what gets everyone to see what you’ve been going on about for years, then the wait will have been worth it.