But “Walls Closing In,” a standout from Dot Dash’s latest album, Earthquakes & Tidal Waves, is a change of pace. (Listen below.)

“It’s kind of the heaviest song on the record, and probably the heaviest song that this band has ever done,” says guitarist and vocalist Terry Banks, 50, who’s played in Glo-Worm, Tree Fort Angst and St. Christopher in addition to The Saturday People and Julie Ocean. (Dot Dash’s other guitarist, Steve Hansgen, once played in Minor Threat.) “I’m not saying it’s some incredibly visceral thing — music gets a whole lot heavier than that. But for us, it’s pretty heavy.”

By contrast, other album cuts sound almost sweet.

“The song before it [“Tatters“] is a very light, jangly pop song, so I felt like the obvious thing to follow it up with would be the heaviest song on the record,” Banks says. “And it’s not like this cliché of ending the album with the heavy rocker. It’s kind of right in the middle, and maybe it forms a midway point or apex or something like that.”

But despite being heavier than the rest of the album, “Walls Closing In” is undoubtedly the work of Dot Dash — which is to say, it’s a shrink wrap-tight pop song.

As for the song’s lyrics, Banks isn’t getting too bogged down by details. “I don’t feel like any songs that I ever come up with are necessarily specifically about anything,” he says. “They’re kind of arrived at in a sort of instinctive way.”

Rather than moving from one concrete point to another, a lot of Banks’ lyrics tend to be semi-impressionistic, drawing from a stream-of-consciousness writing style. He says that he tends to feel like songs come out of thin air, “but then I’ll realize that that chorus or that phrase sort of relates to some passing thought or some conversation I had.”

But before you try to start ascribing meaning to Banks’ lyrical style, he makes one thing clear: “We have no message, there is no message.” Dot Dash songs are open to interpretation that way.

“The message is whatever you take from it,” Banks says.

Dot Dash plays an album release show at Comet Ping Pong Friday, April 24.

This changed a bit with 1998’s 99th Dream, a careful, eclectic record that demonstrated Franklin’s increasing restlessness and maturity as a songwriter. It also wound up being many fans’ least favorite Swervedriver record. Seventeen years later, I Wasn’t Born To Lose You is the band’s first full-length since 99th Dream, a fact that brings both good news and bad. The bad news: It sounds more like 99th Dream than anything else in Swervedriver’s discography. The good news: 99th Dream is far better than most people remember, and I Wasn’t Born To Lose You is just as dreamy, subtle and winning. If not necessarily as rocking.

“Autodidact” not only sets the tone for the album, but also sums up Swervedriver’s past and present. Wistful and yearning, it flirts with both beauty and dissonance as Franklin offers humbly poetic observations about “gas stations as churches.” His voice — which always bore a welcome resemblance to the starry-eyed croon of Grant Hart from Hüsker Dü, a group that clearly influenced Swervedriver as much as, say, Cocteau Twins — has eroded a bit since Swervedriver’s ’90s heyday. But that slightly rugged quality only makes the dreamy longing of “For A Day Like Tomorrow” sound that much more bittersweet.

The eclecticism last heard on 99th Dream shows up here, most notably in the stoner-rock groove of “Red Queens Arms Race” — if it’s an homage to Queens Of The Stone Age, it’s a worthy one — and the psychedelic prog of “Lone Star,” an ambitiously arranged showcase for Franklin’s sprawling ambition. Only two tracks, “Last Rites” and “I Wonder,” fit the classic shoegaze mold; even then, they splice hard-edged emotional realism into all that churning, billowy noise. As a melodicist, Franklin has never been stronger or more intimate. And even though I Wasn’t Born To Lose You doesn’t rank up there with Mezcal Head in terms of capturing a zeitgeist — or just plain rocking out — its soft, warm glow is a subtle reminder that shoegaze, all these years later, still has space left to explore.

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