Julian McCamman/Photo: Meg Ha

I still find it strange that “My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It” was only released in January of this year. It sounds to me like something to discover in retrospect. Not because it is backwards-facing or generically out-of-time—rather, the opposite. It sounds like something that should be excavated on some “essential albums of” list, and beamed straight into the personal canon, longingly heard as a record that could no longer be made. It’s like a complete artistic statement, pages long and somehow still grammatically correct. It sounds, I mean, like a classic.

“My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It” is Julian McCamman’s second album as Victoryland, but his first full collaboration with Dan Howard. Though McCamman remains the voice and the face attached to the name, each song’s writing, performance and production are credited to the two of them equally, and it’s Howard’s role that has liberated the Victoryland vision. These songs should have already existed, but they couldn’t have. There is the shimmery maximalism of Animal Collective; the shout-chant vocals of the New Radicals; the earnest, upbeat frantics of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah; the stadium-sized brushstrokes of…U2?

Victoryland is out to capture big feelings, and they know that going big is the way to do it, just like the fence-swinging indies of the aughts. But the same sounds and ideas won’t do; things have changed, and with the things the feelings, and with the feelings the techniques we have for articulating them. So Victoryland lands on one way of sounding out contemporary paranoia (the cameras, which surveil everywhere but the heart), insecurity (emotional or financial or otherwise) and physicality (mediated, awkward and needy nonetheless).

“My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It”

I have the sense that McCamman and Howard made these songs because they needed to hear them, to hear the bravado that McCamman manages when he sings on “You Were Solved” that “I’ll dance like / I’m your bitch” paired with the absolute sonic assurance that Howard has constructed behind him. Or to hear the painfully apparent reminder on “I got god” that porn, TV and drugs “ain’t got what you want,” a half-joking PSA that drags into the record’s most tender moment, the song’s twinkly outro and one of McCamman’s best lines, “I remember fondly having feelings to hide.” Hidden, I guess, in the heart with no cameras in it, which here appears to us in startling high definition.

Victoryland brings along Drook from Richmond, Virginia, who veers toward genuine pop in the vein of The 1975 with buoyant, cleansed arrangements that hide a more pent-up musical subjectivity. I’ve seen them live once before, and they let the muscular roots of their songs breathe—more bite on the spoken vocals, more percussive theatrics, punkier movements. I remember that everyone in the band seemed athletic; I mean, their album is called “The Pure Joy of Jumping.” They look toward pop music with the same aspirations as Victoryland, looking for a sound that democratizes, that makes a feeling legible to as many people as possible, that moves rather than thinks.

These aren’t feelings that befit pop music though—they are more layered and more knotted, and their musical sublimation is all the more ecstatic. The second half of Victoryland’s “You Were Solved” chorus might be a fitting thesis for the whole demonstration: “we’re just shaking out / the night from our wrists.” Sweaty release, spoken in the collective from the personal, resists the bland flattening of pop idiom while incorporating its sensibility.

Local support comes from Godstar Megamax, one of Chicago’s best live bands on the heels of their “Meat Rabbit” EP. They’ll give us the raw materials of the evening: abstract offerings from post-rock, punk, electronic, noise and folk that cohere in different arrangements according to which particular member leads the charge. There is precarity via Buster Keaton, goodbyes borrowed from Neil Young and screw-you poetry lifted straight from the page. They’re the farthest we’ll stray from pop clarity, but even Godstar Megamax can’t resist a stickily straightforward refrain. “Wherever we are / you’re there,” Paolo Maseri sings on “Wherever We Are You’re There,” and it’s the kind of pared down statement fully-loaded with feeling that could pop up at any point in the night.

McCamman told The Line of Best Fit that “the shows are kind of a manifestation of what the music feels like it’s about, which is just being in the same room with each other.” So if you want to know about this music—all three acts, I’d say—and what it means, I will see you at the show, in a room that is anxious, embittered, heartbroken, empty, pathetic, jittery, precarious, ecstatic and liberated.

Victoryland/Drook/Godstar Megamax at the Empty Bottle, 1035 North Western, August 19. Tickets and more here.