In an unfortunate timing fluke, Halcyon Digest — Deerhunter’s last album focusing on themes of nostalgia and memory — arrived only two short months after The Suburbs, Arcade Fire’s dominating indie monolith similarly centered on the same themes. The songs on Halcyon Digest focused on memory, but contained none of Arcade Fire’s autobiographical details, references to current events, setting in familiar American landscapes or “voice of a generation” social commentary.

Like a good portion of indie musicians — Vampire Weekend, Sufjan Stevens, Passion Pit and other giants — Arcade Fire addressed a specific generation of middle class Americans; The Suburbs relied on pre-established connections between the suburbs, childhood and nostalgia. While The Suburbs established personal experiences as part of a collective North American, middle-class memory, Halcyon Digest rarely establishes realistic settings, never references historical events and decorates the album with surrealistic black-and-white photographs. Listeners receive a few snippets of description (“the smell of loose-leaf joints on jeans,” “the lights inside my cave”) and a lot of broadly symbolic statements. On “Desire Lines,” lead singer Bradford Cox’s strange, wailing voice calling, “Forever reaching for the gold / Forever fades black, and comes up cold,” exudes tragedy and confusion while eluding all but the vaguest of interpretations. Digest’s hypnotically repetitive arrangements construct empty, possibly haunted landscapes, inviting the listener to fill in the details. At best, Deerhunter’s music is a blank slate, transcending relative differences in social class, generation and geographical setting to reflect every listener’s particular personal experience.

On the heels of Halcyon Digest, Monomania’s constant mimicry initially feels tired, co-opting formulas from all the usual rock and punk giants. As Cox shifts between Lou Reed’s nasal inflections and Bob Dylan’s throaty rasp, Deerhunter adopts the Ramones’ garage punk, X’s reverb-drowned rock, Dylan’s rock-oriented Americana and the straightforward classic rock of R.E.M. The heavily roots-influenced “Pensacola” tells a folksy story about taking a train ride to Pensacola to see a woman, making me wonder where Halcyon Digest’s enigmatic imagery disappeared to. But toward the end of “Pensacola,” the country twang lurches uncomfortably while Cox’s voice stretches the line, “I came down from the delta right through the planes” into a hypnotic chant. After a few repetitions, Cox twists the line from a simple statement of fact to a mournful, searching drone. By the end of “Pensacola,” the lyrics shed stereotypical connotation; from easily recognizable components, Deerhunter creates a sound so pure and rhythmic it seems impossible to classify. Deerhunter is less concerned with adopting early rock ’n’ roll’s attachment to Southern rural cities, train traveling and lost loves than discovering how — at an essential, emotional level — classic roots music holds so much power.

Cox is a musician, not a fan; Monomania strives not to reconstruct the success of older greats, but to question why those styles were appealing in the first place. At its best, Monomania, like Halcyon Digest, creates strange landscapes, inviting the listener to explore and interpret. The opener, “Neon Junkyard,” uses a jangly, echoing garage rock beat to build an empty, cluttered scene, rain “coming down in sheets” over piles of junk. “And if you have a ritual / You’ll be drowned by rain,” Cox wails, in lyrics haunting and elusive as ever. Monomania drowns in distortion; the song is less reminiscent of ’70s punk than a man’s desperate monologue sent through a faulty radio transmitter in a thunderstorm.

Monomania, which drops May 7, refers to Bradford Cox’s single-minded obsession with music. In a recent interview, Cox admitted, “I sit at home and play guitar. … I devote my life to all those little details, so there’s not really any room for me to develop a social life. I don’t have a private life to speak of. Everything’s out there in the music.” Cox and, more broadly, Deerhunter, are concerned with making powerful music, not simply adopting the surface attributes of different musical styles. Cox doesn’t have a woman down in Pensacola; Deerhunter’s adoption of classic rock and punk tropes derives from an appreciation of and desire to create similarly compelling music. While other indie rock bands explore historical and cultural implications, Cox will play and sing until all cultural allusions break down into the essential components of sound.