I retain a youthful tendency to fall hard for certain songs, albums, and music artists (and certain films and filmmakers, but that’s a different topic), and no performers have been more successful in recent years at making me dizzy with delight than Diet Cig. I adored the duo’s debut album, Swear I’m Good At This, and plopped myself and my aging knees smack in the middle of benevolently boisterous crowds at live shows, feeling every one of Noah Bowman drum thumps in my chest and gazing giddily at Alex Luciano sawing fiercely at her guitar while bouncing across the stage like a Super Ball. To a degree I’ve experienced only rarely since my college radio days, Diet Cig burrowed into me.

“Night Terrors,” the band’s new single and their first new material in three years, has predictably set me swooning again. Their pop-punk energy is tempered a bit, which only serves to swerve them a little closer to the lane paved in salty sweetness by Juliana Hatfield back in the nineteen-nineties. That works for me. All indications are that my borderline obsession (a kind, friendly, warm-hearted obsession, please note) isn’t likely to abate any time soon.