America is Dan Deacon’s most powerful work to date, the culmination of years spent playing both DIY venues and concert halls across the world, of exercises in the power of the individual and a coordinated mass, of a disenfranchised mind questioning notions of cultural identity and values. The ecstatic, celebratory sounds found on America, are in compelling contrast with the darker thematic undercurrents. The album demonstrates anger, confusion, and apocalyptic anxiety over corporatism and war, but finds consolation in the geography of the United States and in recent social movements both domestic and international. There’s a subtler approach to timbre on America, informed by Deacon’s recent experiences in the classical world – commissions and collaborations, his Carnegie Hall debut; his first film score (for a Francis Ford Coppola film). The integration of acoustic textures – including concert percussion, winds, brass, and strings — has ramped up exponentially since Deacon first ventured outside of purely synthesized sound on 2009’s Bromst. The most raw cut from the album, ‘Lots’, seems a fitting introduction to a collection of songs that sit at the intersection of noise, pop, dance and chamber music. Filled with the struggle and opportunity rampant in Deacon’s America, Lots’ lyrics bounce between a post-apocalyptic world influenced by Cormac McCathy’s The Road and a call not to lose sight of the current movements that aim to change a broken system.