On 2007's …Are the Dark Horse, Canada met a fine psychedelic shoegaze band built around the Montreal-based husband-and-wife tandem of Jace Lacek and Olga Goreas. It wasn't the pair’s first album, but it may as well have been, given the scant attention The Besnard Lakes had received outside its hometown.

With …Are the Roaring Night, the band picks up where its effective debut left off, trotting out another series of reverb-laden epics that take advantage of the interplay between big guitars and the couple's slow-burn vocals. As before, this is all packaged with the same undercurrent of a story about spies riding trains and being mysterious, but that rarely goes beyond adding a bit of texture to the meaty musical frame.

The album's most obvious landmarks are the two-part tracks "Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent" and "Land of the Living Skies," each built around melodies that will be familiar to returning fans. These serve as launching points for one-off tracks like "Glass Printer" and the Goreas-fronted "Albatross," which depart from the established framework, but the album's best moments hug the band's usual arc. Most notably, the home stretch of the album is anchored by "And This is What We Call Progress," where the monster guitar riff that has been lurking in the shadows for the whole album finally swirls into existence. It's a rollicking, straightforward song and, nestled among a few dirge-like tracks that threaten to drag on for some listeners, it makes for a great payoff. Showcasing top-notch musicianship and production, not to mention Lacek's piercing falsetto, perhaps the biggest surprise is that the band opted to package the relatively underwhelming "Albatross," and not this obvious standout, as the lead single.