Night Palace is a shocking alchemy: aching nostalgia meets frothy anticipation of what’s beyond the garden wall. You find yourself picturing it: a moonlit-gilded diorama of Avery Draut’s dreams and memories.

Growing up, Draut would wake to her dad blasting Court and Spark or Nilsson Schmilsson as he danced around the living room, riling the dogs. At school in Athens, Georgia she studied visual art and theatre before focusing on classical voice. Burned out after five years of fruitful but intensive opera performance, she found a Magic Genie™ organ at the thrift store and sat down, for the first time, to write songs of her own.

Draut’s early explorations into the local music scene held a magic specific to the artistic incubator of Athens: she duetted on Jackson 5 songs with of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes at her best friend’s wedding, and opened for Kishi Bashi, singing Hebrew folks songs in a chamber ensemble.

“It really was super natural”, laughs Duncan Troast, explaining how he and Nick Corson came to form The Convenience, and though he means it was as organic as breathing, the music these two conjure is from an alternate reality. Pulling from a pastiche of 80’s sounds and their own rolodex of future pop flourishes, their new album Accelerator sounds like a late-night disco party on a distant outpost, a sea of dancing bodies illuminated by an alien moon. The titular track, “Accelerator (Pts I + II)”, sets the pace of the record, its rubbery bassline and silky vocals an undeniable dopamine injection. It’s a song that fantasizes about losing control, inviting someone to take the wheel, “in a romantic way”, they insist.

“Fake Roses” builds over a pulsing kick drum, glittering synths sparkling around Corson’s cool and steady voice before a digital orchestra and stuttering vocal samples overtake the song.“It’s a state of the union of our lives”, a reflection on sobriety, lingering doubt, and coming to terms with the place you’re in. While some songs were a puzzle-like piecing together of disparate ideas, “Kiss Me In Heaven” arrived fully formed after a night out, a kaleidoscopic swirl of synth bass and delicate guitar arpeggios, its lush chorus a sonic revelation.

“I had a hard time learning how to do things the right way, and just wanted to make something, just make a mess”, says Corson, thinking back on his earliest experiments with songwriting and production. You can hear that spirit in the brief noise collage that opens “Saturday’s Child”, but the immaculate pop song that follows makes it clear - whatever they’re doing is working. “We failed so much”, he insists, but their striking debut refutes that.

At its core, Accelerator is a celebration of friendship, and the transportative power of music. It’s an ode to the joy of dancing, of loving just to have loved, and becoming who you are.