Though it goes a long way to reinstating Blonde Redhead’s singular mystique and impressionistic aura, Sit Down for Dinner is distinguished by an easygoing melodicism that, even in its darkest lyrical depths, makes it the warmest and most welcoming record in the band’s catalog. But as she skates atop the song’s icy-electro rhythm, the line becomes more of a seize-the-day manifesto-death can come for you at any moment, so you might as well get your rocks off while you can. “Sit down for dinner/And the life as you know, it ends/No pity,” Makino sings, quoting Didion in a tone so matter-of-fact it sounds like a merciless taunt. In this light, the phrase Sit Down for Dinner is less an invitation than a threat, and the duality of the sentiment is manifest in Makino’s two-part title-track suite, a hypnotically wistful ballad that upshifts abruptly into an accelerated drum-machine workout. With life suddenly on pause, Makino was drawn to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a meditation on her husband John Gregory Dunne’s fatal heart attack at their dining-room table in December 2003. Sit Down for Dinner is a pandemic album through and through, from its protracted, piecemeal recording process-spanning several seasons, multiple studios, and at least two continents-to its overwhelming sense of restless stasis. But an insistent rhythmic pulse-powered by percussionist Mauro Refosco-punches holes through the sparkling surface, restoring the contrast between fine-china delicacy and dark-cloud distress at the core of this band’s most resonant work. Sit Down for Dinner honors that tradition with “Snowman,” which sets a deceptively languid tone with gleaming acoustic guitars and Amedeo’s beautifully sighed serenade. While they differed in style and scope, this band’s signature works- Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Misery Is a Butterfly, and 23-were united by a policy of swift and total immersion: Each led with a striking opening track that immediately thrust you into the album’s distinct three-dimensional sound, making it feel like you’ve been dropped into a film already in progress. Arriving nine years on from their last full-length release, Sit Down for Dinner is the life-saving dose of CPR that gets this band’s oxygen flowing and blood pumping again. Once the pandemic took hold, you could be forgiven for wondering if the band would still be standing on the other side of it. In 2019, Makino released her first solo album, by which point Blonde Redhead had all but ground to a halt. But that sort of frisson was in short supply on 2010’s Penny Sparkle and 2014’s Barragán, records that resembled mood boards of disparate sounds in search of songs, with little of the dramatic flair that powered the band’s previous transformations.

In the stellar seven-album run from 1995’s serrated self-titled debut to 2007’s shimmering shoegaze odyssey 23, Blonde Redhead had successfully pivoted from no-wave noisemakers to arthouse-indie auteurs, all while sustaining a highwire balance of melodic whimsy and needling tension. There was a certain cruel irony in the fact a song that began as a time-killing lark-recorded by singer Kazu Makino while her twin-brother accomplices Amedeo and Simone Pace were sleeping at the studio-would become the defining work of a group that’s otherwise taken such a methodical approach to their craft.

For the damaged coda movie