In late August, a band I play in shared a bill with Forth Wanderers in Paterson, New Jersey. The bands that played all originated in Montclair, 20 minutes away by car. The one I played in, Stolen Jars, is the project of my college roommate, who grew up in Montclair. He took the band with him to college, and though the members changed, Montclair remains its musical home.

When Forth Wanderers played, they were missing their vocalist. Songs left unsung, their set took on an agitated pace, punctuated occasionally by dips into half-time swings. When I first listened to Tough Love, I recognized the instrumentation but not the songwriting. As a full band, the version that Forth Wanderers present on Tough Love is amazingly contemplated, casual, and assured.

The members of Forth Wanderers—vocalist Ava Trilling, guitarists Ben Guterl and Duke Green, bassist Noah Schifrin and drummer Zach Loreli—all went to different colleges this fall. Tough Love, their first full-length, came out over Thanksgiving break. The processes of splintering and re-uniting, of moving both backwards and forwards, and of being hopelessly stuck between the two scaffold the record.

Trilling’s opening lines, delivered throughout Tough Love with a devastating calm, alternate almost song-for-song between hopes and laments, and never settle into comfort with the present. “I wanna be known as the girl who’s stone cold,” she opens on “Selfish.” She follows on “Painting of Blue” with “I’m not the girl I was.” Her melodies always seem to circle back on themselves. The guitar work that underscores the record jerks and sways, working mostly in intricate and interlocking picked patterns. Guterl and Green work in chorus with each other, and the arpeggiations they draw bring the sound extremely close.

Tough Love has eight songs and is 25 minutes long. There’s something about that length and that pace that feels perfect for mid-December—its brightness is short-lived. I’ve made it through the album multiple times without even realizing that it’s on repeat, and its ease and effortlessness have drawn me in every time. It might be the fact that songs don’t move in any type of traditional structure. There are hooks and repetitions, but no clear verse/chorus/bridge delineations. “Television,” Tough Love’s final track, flips through a series of phrases that feel immediate and catchy, but by song’s end they’ve slipped into a studio fade. That’s when I’ll play it again.

Tough Love is out now via Forth Wanderers’ Bandcamp.