The General Assembly has been a vessel for Matt Wicking's music since 2009. There was one album, 2017's Vanishing Point. It brought together a few unlikely musical worlds — muscular, beautifully confident melodies delivered in baritone, soundscapes that conjure wide scenes of nature, and lyrics rooted in folk storytelling: think Depeche Mode falling for Eno-esque sound design and making an album of collaborations with Grizzly Bear or Fleet Foxes.

And then a diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome limited Matt's activity in music and ordinary life for many years. Happily, now he has come back with a new lineup and an updated sound showcased on the fresh-out-of-the-oven record Goodbye Nostalgia. The vision is completely the band's own, but if I had to describe it to an unsuspecting potential fan, I'd say: imagine Cigarettes After Sex with stadium-sized melodies, or Mumford & Sons embracing a more sincere approach and falling in love with synth sound design.

The album starts with the eponymous song. I instantly fell in love with band when I heard the guitar textures setting the scene for Matt's powerful voice delivering a hymn-like half-confession, half-motto:

The lyrics are beautifully delicate. A porcelain cup had cracked. And the crack was then fixed with gold. But the fix never lasted.

We are all porcelain cups trying to fix ourselves with substances – sometimes hard and shiny, sometimes poisonous and liquid, but the results are always the same: one day we have to go back to where we belong. And the cracks are never fully mended. They stay with the cup, adding to the beauty of what the Japanese call wabi-sabi.

What struck me about the song is how the sound design manages to stay both intimate and epic. Imagine something like watching a sunset in the desert from the top of the mountain with someone you love. That's the closest I could come to describing the feeling. Moreover, you had to ascend to the top for a few hours, so now the bliss is hard-earned (but there's still a hint of hidden sadness in it). That's the music of The General Assembly – at least to my heart and my ears.

New Morning is just as texturally rich and minimalistic. But this time the soundscapes come mostly from synths. The minimalistic background leaves a lot of space for the vocals to breathe. The verses are sung in a rich baritone, and then there's a sudden sense of elevation in the choruses with their piercing falsetto and warm backing vocals.

"New Morning is about the pain we add to pain – when we add disappointment to loss, frustration to sickness, anger to difficult circumstances – and about the lightness that comes with letting that extra layer of pain go," explains Matt. The song definitely has the sort therapeutic power that he talks about – not only in its lyrical message, but also purely as a piece of music that helps you relax both your body and mind. The relaxing quality of the song still leaves room for a quiet catharsis at the end of the track with its guitar solo that gradually blurs into an all-swallowing texture.

Six Ways of Looking at a Stone, on the other hand, offers no catharsis. It just goes on, ruthlessly like time, and gracefully, like things time produces. The title is a play on the poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens. This time we're looking at a stone, but with the same philosophic glance that Wallace Stevens possessed:

Aristotle, expanding on Plato's doctrine of ideas, taught us that every object possesses its past as history and its future as potential. Matt holds a stone in his hands, seeing its past as volcanic lava and its future as black sand. What's less clear is our future as a civilization. Are we heading to what Matt describes as "a climate changed future, with extinctions, and bird calls we no longer hear" or somewhere more peaceful and driven by wisdom? The song never resolves and never gives us a clear answer. But its beauty gives us hope. And we drive on, and the album does too.

Crow, the album's focus track, is driven by a pulsing beat — is it heartbeat? or does it accompany a tribal dance? Likely both are the same thing, especially in the spotlight of a song pointing at "Indigenous knowledge as sources of wisdom in challenging times". The song's hopeful harmonies, especially in the chorus that brings relief, its uplifting — solemn yet sentimental – melodies, warm synths and distorted textural guitars bring to mind The Killers' best songs.

A banger like Crow demands a moment of introspection to clear your mind and cleanse your palate. And it comes in the form of a beautiful ambient-informed piece A Setting Sun that could soundtrack almost any moment of peace coming after a wave of excitement and exhaustion – for example, a beautiful morning in nature after a rave.

Blood Returning Back unfolds and gains more and more force slowly, much like its subject — a body recovering from a serious illness and finding strength in nature. Its muffled guitars and filtered synth pads are like underground springs awaiting to awaken, or like the potential of our body to heal itself, to live life in full and to create something from nothing. By the end of the song all those hidden pulses turn into an unstoppable hurricane, bursting with rhythms, melodies, timbres and textures.

But everything comes in circles. Black Light is another moment of calmness and introspection after the hurricane. The song's central image is "ultraviolet light pulsing at the bottom of the sea, also mirrored in our hearts, calling us home". The sound design here is remarkable, bringing to mind the soundtracks of Hans Zimmer, and Matt's voice is especially dark and heavy.

It's remarkable how the same voice expands into the realms of soul and even gospel on She, a hymn to mother nature full of high spiritual energies that kept sending shivers down my spine, as I kept listening to the song. The poetry here is of the highest order:

The album ends with The Ways We Once Were – another beautiful instrumental. It sounds hopeful in the best way possible. Mother nature knows no boundaries and equally embraces life and death. But we don't, we are rooting for ourselves, our family and, after all, our civilization. And with albums like Goodbye Nostalgia you can feel that not all is lost. The album never seeks beauty for the sake of beauty, it doesn't avoid tough subjects and heavy emotions, does not look away from problems of planetary scopes, and uses its own musical language to talk of such matters. And finds beauty in that. At times it hurts, at times heals. But both are parts of the life cycle. And an album that can embrace all of its dark and beautiful parts deserves a special place in our hearts and, honestly, one in our planet's history.