The Montreal-via-Calgary band Telstar Drugs emerged from the same Western Canadian ecosystem that produced Women, and the resemblance is difficult to ignore. Guitars chime, clatter, recoil, and interlock in nervous geometries while bass and drums stubbornly hold the rhythm. But where Women could make that instability feel confrontational, Telstar Drugs make it comfortable.

Sonatine’s nine songs sound assembled from scattered pieces: guitar fragments, clipped rhythms, synthesizers, tape noise, acoustic instruments, accidents. Recorded by the band at Montreal’s Egg Paper Factory, the album is less a collection of songs than a series of collisions. Things scrape against each other. Things disappear. Things break.

Opener “Misstep” defines the album’s vocabulary: guitars bent into strange angles over a rhythm section that refuses to acknowledge the instability. “Greyed Rainbow” is spacious and no less unsettled, its melody slowly revealing itself beneath layers of guitar abrasion. On “Thoughts in Loops,” small figures circle themselves until the repetition sounds inevitable.

The album’s center and perhaps standout, “Pulley,” is three minutes of nervous propulsion. Bass and drums move forward while guitars pull sideways, metallic bursts ricocheting between the channels. It shouldn’t work but it works fantastically.

Sonatine’s final half (“Ceaseless Intent,” “Gamelan,” “Big Sur,” and “Soft Focus”) forms the album’s gravitational constant, stretching the band’s skeletal post-punk into a kind of restless hypnotism. The architecture is atypical, haunted and sometimes serene. Patterns accumulate and dissolve without settling into recognizable shapes. Edges blur and recede. Melodies emerge unexpectedly. It is all a beautiful haze, resigned, atmospheric, and executed with mesmerizing patience and control.

Sonatine’s ghosts are obvious. Women, certainly. Perhaps Sonic Youth at their most skeletal. Post-punk stripped of predictable posture. The album might feel accidental at times, but only because Telstar Drugs are unusually good at disguising intention. Underneath the apparent disorder is a band fixated to every collision and intent on leaving just enough space for something unexpected to happen. Not quite art rock. Not quite noise rock. Too melodic to be purely experimental and too restless to settle comfortably anywhere else. A strange and wonderful transmission from a lost frequency, luckily captured to tape.