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I was nervous about the new Wye Oak album. I have significant admiration for the duo’s previous record, 2011’s Civilian, but it was clear that Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack were moving in a new direction, one seemingly influenced by the former’s experimentation with electronic and synth-based music in the side project Flock of Dimes. My reticence wasn’t about a churlish desire to see a favorite artist stick with the sound that made me like them in the first place (well, not entirely). Rather, it sprung from a sense that Wasner’s digressions into this arena were a little bland. Awash in richly powerful guitars, Civilian had a power and authority that was lacking in what I’d heard from Flock of Dimes. More troublingly, I’d seen and heard them play a good chunk of the new album at an early tour stop in Asheville, and the results were underwhelming. It was, by their onstage testimony, one of the first times they’d played the songs before a live, paying audience, so that could account for some of the blandness and hesitancy. Still, it’s not a good sign when a set only comes to life when older standbys are pulled out.

The new album, Shriek, is indeed a significant shift in some ways. Wasner’s guitars are replaced by keyboards and other instrumentation that fills in the textures, a brave development considered her easy, tough heroics with the six-string stood as a major component of the band’s appeal. And yet as I listened through to it, I was struck by how often it clearly sounded like Wye Oak with a different jacket, silk instead of leather. Wye Oak was never really the Ramones, after all. The goal was always developing a full, complex soundscape. Tracks like the title cut and “Glory” unmistakably bear the established personality of the band in their artful back-and-forth shifts in volume and dynamics. And then there’s Wasner’s throaty, evocative lead vocals, nestled into the songs like one more vital instrument, the one adding a little soul to all the technical prowess. Wasner’s vocals might benefit the most from the sonic shift, their warmth standing out against the tense iciness of the electronics. From the moment she sings the first lines on the album (“This morning I woke up on the floor/ Thinking I’ve never dreamed before,” on “Before”), Wasner stands out, even more than on earlier releases.

Some of the experimentation plainly doesn’t work. The heavy distortion on Wasner’s vocals through much of “Despicable Animal” robs the band of one of its chief strengths (there’s also a weird Tears for Fears vibe to it that doesn’t exactly go down well), and “I Know the Law” seems to be reaching for Kate Bush’s elegant weirdness but has an unfortunate tinge of nineteen-eighties pablum R&B to it. More often, though, Wye Oak’s studio playfulness pays off. Album closer “Logic of Color” is cheesy, but it also has a slick pop loveliness to it, recalling the most irresistible moments of Haim’s debut album. Uneven as it may be, Shriek represents Wye Oak confronting the risky staidness of artistic success head on. The could have chased the relative success of Civilian by replicating it as closely as they could. Instead, they opted for growth and change, and all the risks and rewards they entail. It’s the sound of a talented band breaking away from itself. That’s an interesting, exciting thing.