BEFORE YOU LISTEN to Duracraft, the new four-song EP by The Prids, you should turn up your stereo as loud as it can possibly go without breaking champagne glasses. That's because this album deserves to become the landscape of the room, the car, or wherever you are listening. Its sound rises up from the floorboards like a jangling stalagmite. It's sticky, musty, and sulky-cool.

You will press play, and "Liezencages" will begin. The keyboard melody will wrap around the dark bass like a cloak, stitched together with a milky vocal. The drums will remind you to dance, hands clasped behind your back, and you'll lose a little equilibrium when the song increases its pace, going from murky to urgent, and ending all at once.

The second track, "Memoreyes," will take you to a windy, industrial section of a gloomy city, where forgotten voices whisper from the darkness. Or you might be in the New Orleans of Poppy Z. Brite, where pale-faced goth children tempt the paranormal, searching swamps for ghosts and absinthe. You will feel like you are sinking in danky muck, until the sunrise-sweet "Fades in Time," in which Mistina Prid's distantly airy voice sheds a ghostly light. Now you are floating, warm, soft, and safe. Finally, "Duracraft" finishes your journey, pulling you back to the dance you started with, confident rhythms and lush, consuming, lightheaded melodies.

You will like Duracraft because you loved Bauhaus, Joy Division, and The Cure when it seemed there was no one else to love in music. You will like The Prids because they're not only paying homage to the earliest, deepest, and best new wave, but because they capture what was so cool about it to begin with. They're dark, but smart-dark, not weepy-dark or kill-your-parents-dark. They're smoky, like a trenchcoat and a black-blooded heart.

And you will listen to Duracraft very, very loudly, because it is a portal to a world like the ones in Marc Caro films, a landscape where the day never comes, but it is warm and you'd like to stay there for a little while.