“Everything around us is buzzing with information,” says Floodland’s Aaron Green, “and most of it is crap.” And thus the indie-rock quartet has titled its new full-length Static Walls, a collection of 11 songs about “struggling to push against all that stuff.”After years spent building a reputation as one of Halifax’s tightest, most proficient, hardest-playing bands, Floodland has returned with its first music since 2015’s Music Nova Scotia Award-nominated Best Rock Recording It’s the Fire. Static Walls demonstrates a band that knows what it wants and where it wants to go. Eschewing the classic Halifax approach of “let’s pick away at it in the basement, whenever we have time,” the band—singer/guitarist Green, drummer Eamonn Slattery, guitarist Luke Levy and new bassist Tori Cameron—decamped to Toronto for a dedicated studio move-in with The Wooden Sky’s Gavin Gardiner.“Fuck I wish my band sounded like this on a record” is what Green says his reaction was to The Wooden Sky’s Let’s Be Ready a couple years back. So Floodland went directly to the source of that sound. “He has a good ethos of ‘I don’t give a shit about ‘perfect,’ we’re going for something that feels good,’” says Green of Gardiner. “He likes happy accidents.” Those happy accidents, combined with high-quality musicianship, a mixed bag of influences and a wide-ranging lyrical eye, have created a contender of a record in Static Walls—dynamic, catchy, varied and repeatable. The first single, “Tangled,” is about “doing the same thing over and over with somebody expecting it to work out,” says Green. The gently epic piano closer “Fiona” was named in tribute to Fiona Apple. The slow build of “Hurricane” evokes fellow Nova Scotians Wintersleep, and “Scarce” leans into the art-rock of Radiohead. “Sonder” is “a little bit out of our mojo, kind of a country song,” says Green. With a tour set for this fall and into next year, those static walls will be humming with the sound of Floodland, confident and striving. Or, as Gardiner would say to the band take after take, “we’re gonna keep going until it stops getting better.”