Since emerging from Montreal’s scene in 2016, Choses Sauvages has kept the music coming at a steady pace—but each of their full-length albums feels like a distinct creature. On Choses Sauvages III, they lean deep into bass-heavy Québécois disco-funk, with most tracks kicking off on a hooky low-end groove before often veering into rock and roll territory.

As with all their releases, legions of synth layers—sometimes feeling like the backdrop of a 2D video game level (“Incendie au paradis”)—chew the scenery as lead vocalist Felix Bélisle sings about disruption and the mundanity of local life. It’s a highly danceable new wave record, never getting too weird so as to alter your need to groove and bop along with it. Even the spindly post-punk bop “Faux départ” knows when to chill out on the sonic guitar strangeness.

While Choses Sauvages does subscribe to a maximalist approach on many songs like “Cour toujours,” they never get lost in it. It’s sometimes a bright wall of sound: hard to decipher what is actually being played, a guitar made to sound like a synth or vice versa, but the funky bassline always keeps you in check, making way for an atmospheric, vocoder-backed outro. 

“Chaos initial,” the slowest song on III, offers a new sound for the Choses Sauvages boys—a female-led voice track by Lysandre that lays you gently on a cascading cloud with warm synths. It’s a nice and calming reprieve before the boys get back to their funky basics on “En joue.” If you’ve never heard of Choses Sauvages before, III is a perfect example of everything they do best.