“Vampires,” our first taste of Pink Mountaintops’ forthcoming third album Outside Love, is quintessential Stephen McBean: A romantic, slightly sexy late-night dispatch from the dingy bed of some roadside motel. The first thing you’ll notice about Outside‘s “While We Were Dreaming”? It’s not McBean intoning the storyline. Instead, Ashley Webber, sister of Lightning Duster and McBean’s Black Mountain mate Amber Webber, handles the words, words that involve pulling a heart from a chest and smashing it until it bleeds (hopefully calming the voices in your skull). It’s a beautiful track, and the closest Pink Mountaintops have come to sounding like Claudia Gonson-fronted Magnetic Fields. Maybe that’s what happens when you sit around contemplating Otard cognac and your first editions.

• Pink Mountaintops – “While We Were Dreaming”Download

If you remember, McBean mentioned one of Outside Love‘s inspirations was “people who haven’t made out yet but will in the future.” How about people who’ve made out in the past but who have no future?

Outside Love is out 5/5 via Jagjaguwar.

[Photo by Jody Rogac]