How on Earth do you expand on an already-perfected sound? Wishy themselves might be too humble to admit it themselves, but last year’s debut album, Triple Seven, sounded like a document of a band who arrived onto the scene with a creative head fully formed from the best style guides of ’90s college rock, dream-pop and shoegaze, and trip-hop pulled off in the hook and chorus of dueling vocalists and guitarists Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites’ delivery. The Indianapolis indie rockers’ latest release, the six-song extended play, Planet Popstar, comes from the same sessions that gave the world Triple Seven, but there’s an obvious intentionality from the five-piece here to challenge themselves to that initial question at hand by going as high as possible. Kirby references aside in its sugar-torched title and opener, the listen imagines a future timeline in the universe where Wishy are indeed the biggest pop-rock band on the planet, or at the very least have what it takes to sound like one in the studio.

Those fatigued by the monotony of shoegaze and dream-pop tropes in this modern timeline will find rejuvenation within the band’s evolution as they ween themselves away from supersaturating the soundboard in fuzzed out bliss. Emotions remain blushed in a daze of wistful, romantic, and anxious thought bubbles floating around one another, but rendered in Wishy’s clear atmosphere, they achieve hi-fi clarity as they reach for a similar major label boldness as the Afghan Whigs’ 1965 through perfectly crisped and compressed alternative pop-rock jams like “Fly” and “Over and Over”, or the sun-kissed gleam of the 1975-on-a-Corrs-bender of “Chaser”. This is as solid as a transitional point as you can ask from a band still amounting in buzz, and what more is that Planet Popstar ventures into a bright, blue horizon that doesn’t make you want to come back down from it.

Highlights: “Fly”, “Planet Popstar”, “Chaser”

Wishy’s Planet Popstar is available now on Winspear.

Buy | Stream