“Some days you want a miracle drug to escape what feels like a prison in your body,” wrote Adrian Acosta in an Instagram post setting the scene for listeners when introducing Draag’s new EP. Though the title track from the Los Angeles experimental dream-pop band’s certainly scrapes and pains itself for a remedy against their journey with living with autoimmune obstacles, it isn’t hard to imagine how hearing the sound of these six tracks can be any escape from whatever has you going through it right now. This world we live in gives you plenty of reason to, at least.

How Draag succeed at this is a wonderful thing of sonic juxtapositions that finds colorful magic inside the darkness regardless. Despite the band — which Acosta provides vocals and guitar duties alongside co-vocalist and synthesist Jessica Huang, bassist Nick Kelley, guitarist Ray Montes, and drummer Shane Graham — playing around with screamo subversion early on in the extended play in that title track with crunchy, punky guitars to bat that stick around much longer after, the soundwaves move through you smoothly like an elixir. It’s neither explicitly shoegaze nor post-punk or indie-pop, with their stylistic amalgamation of a digital goo and brash electric currents being something we’ve really not heard much of since the early Aughts days where Chairlift, the Depreciation Guild, and School of Seven Bells beguiled our senses with as much fluid contortion.

Unlike too many of today’s broader aesthetic-driven artists who’ve found comfort by submerging themselves beneath the static, Draag present as a warmer feeling of desire that transcends superficial layers. Lyrically, words — even if brush-stroked by impressionism — lead the senses through an ambiguity bluff, while the merger of Acosta and Huang into a singular harmony creates an androgynous coating to mirror onto its beholder. Its collective chemical reaction furthers the listen as something as an attempt at an out-of-body-experiment by protruding the subconscious and sliding far and beyond the realm of what we experience in the physical.

Highlights: “Miracle Drug”, “NSPS”, “Hide Me”

Draag’s Miracle Drug is available now on Smoking Room.

Buy | Stream