Awake & Dreaming are a Canadian quartet, and Inevitable is their first album. The band says it is inspired by the evergreen idea of duality — which in practice often means their songs swing between warm and intimate solo piano and epic walls of distortion.

The album, preceded by upcoming singles "Underwater" and "Rewire", arrives October 16 with a vinyl pressing and a ten-date run through Ontario and Quebec. We were lucky enough to get an early listen, and it's an outstanding record. Here's why, one track at a time.

Inevitable starts with "I U Me": epic, almost ritualistic drums, robot-like beeping pulse and a haunting piano line that instantly brought to mind Radiohead. Then, just as it was promised in the press release, the whole soundscape is swallowed by an all-consuming wall of distortion. Interestingly, the music mirrors exactly what we hear in the lyrics:

The constant push and pull between the ever-present wall of noise and the never-ending search for serenity is what drives the song and — as the band admits it — their whole aesthetic. The drama and the quiet swap places until everything blurs together and becomes one: "I am you and you are me in the end."

"Rewire" starts with a mind-numbingly juicy, almost synth-like guitar tone. The mix is built around the tasty guitar and the groove, with the vocals sitting somewhere in the distance. However, the song's image is hedonistic only on the surface: its lively refrain "Inspire me. Desire me. Admire me. Rewire me" eventually ends with "I'm bored", suggesting the loop of desire has no beginning and no end, mirroring the Buddist idea of taṇhā (craving), which is the root of all human suffering.

But how do we put an end to the eternal ring of suffering? By looking inside ourselves and facing our truest feelings. It's what the band does on "Old Ghosts", a song that deals with grief in the most sincere way. The track sounds more sombre and introspective than the rest of the record, and this is conveyed in the mix as well. It is the only song on the album mixed not by the brilliant Jay Dufour, but by the outfit's drummer Ryan. The vision and the emotion behind the song helped it become the group's first success with the audience, winning over more than 140 000 streams on Spotify alone.

"Antidote" once again made me think of peak Radiohead (circa In Rainbows or The King of Limbs): lush strings, lonely piano, crisp drums and, of course, beautiful (and, what's important, instantly memorable and hummable) vocal melodies are a cocktail whose strength is a sense of restrained drama, mirroring the image of getting caught in silver spider webs from the lyrics.

"Cold Shoulder" is all heavy groove and bright, juicy timbres — again blurring the line between synths and guitars. The arrangements leaves enough space for a full choir to eerily and hypnotically chant "Go on give me the cold shoulder" til infinity.

"Underwater" comforts you after that, wrapping you up and lulling you into calm with its wide-open melodies and textural guitars. The lyrics offer the same comfort while pulling you back to the theme of the opener, where chaos and quiet merge rather than drown each other out:

"Lights Down Low" pushes even further into that comfort — the song takes place at home. Acoustic guitar instroduces us to domestic scenes with birthday candles and kids being sent off with a kiss. Sasha sings it like she's talking to you from an armchair with a blanket over her knees, half-volume, nowhere to rush. You could dance to this barefoot on a carpet.

But listen to the actual words she is singing in that beautifully cozy voice. The song opens and closes with the same instruction — put on a smile, blow the candles out — and everything in between asks who's left once the smile comes off. The domestic warmth isn't the setting for the question. Maybe it's the performance the question is about?

The arrangement on "Can't Sleep" comes in waves, rolling over you and lulling you under. The band describe the track as a split: "The lead vocal stays hopeful while the backing vocals carry the anxiety underneath." I hear it the other way round. The lead is where the drama lives — there are moments here that land startlingly close to Matthew Bellamy from Muse — and the backing vocals are the serene landscape it happens in.

The lyric is a slow dance on a sinking ship: "Count to four. Where you lead I will follow." Around it, everything is accelerating and falling apart at the same time: hearts are beating faster, a train is ready to come off the tracks, and the water keeps on rising. And still: "we are safe and warm." The song isn't hopeful or anxious. It radiates the strange comfort of holding onto someone while the thing you're standing on gives way, familiar to many of us, especially in such turbulent times as ours.

"Faceless" (working title: "Eat Your Maker") reminded me of late-era R.E.M. — the melody, the arrangement, the straight-faced seriousness of it. It deals with the image of AI running out of control, and it's notable for how slowly it builds its wall of sound before dropping back to intimate piano, and for the fat organ timbre — the instrument's sound is deliberately synthetic, an imitation of the real thing playing a classical motif.

Closer "Event Horizon" belongs to the organ. It's enormous, and Sasha sings from somewhere inside it, alone, like a kid left in a room where the toys have started moving by themselves.

The track is about looking up to the sky filled with supernovas, colliding black holes, sparklers and fireflies. Space and childhood in the same frame, both of them too big to hold. Every line of the chorus starts with "maybe," and the thing being asked to save us and change us never gets a name. It could be a person, it could be the technology the album has been circling since track one. The record ends on "It's within our grasp," and then the organ takes the room back.

Ten tracks in, you stop looking at the band's duality as a concept and start feeling it in your guts, in a mix of awe, hope and comfort. The noise and the quiet, the living room and the black hole, the lullaby and the thing it's trying to lull you away from — Inevitable keeps setting them against each other and arriving at the same conclusion: they were never two things. Atman and Brahman were always one, and even if the world collapses under whatever catastrophe is coming, that same unity will produce another Hegelian conflict of opposites out of the rubble.

Ideas that big tend to be cold. This band keeps them warm — through honest feeling and melodies tender enough to pull at something in you, all from a group that clearly loves a Wagnerian swell and isn't shy about showing you the darkness of black holes, or the flash off a collapsing star. Albums like this (especially debuts) don't come around often. Pre-order the record and keep an eye on the band at awakeanddreaming.com. Inevitable was made for vinyl, and it wholly deserves the format.