The French quartet Totorro make their long-awaited return with a record that condenses everything great about instrumental rock into a tight and joyous 40 minutes of elation, grandeur and movement. Where most bands in this sphere spend minutes circling their emotions through drawn-out crescendos, Totorro leap straight in with no endless drones, just great riffs. The album uses the familiar building blocks of post-rock but without any of the genre’s usual austerity sprinting through a landscape of warm fuzz and bouncy rhythms instead of trudging through moody ambience.

The opener Bang Bang is a concise blast of exuberance that sets the tone. It’s over in two and a half minutes, followed by Matthew’s Bridge carrying the same bright and hooky spirit. You can’t dance to most post-rock, but this grooves and doesn’t feel academic, with melodies that tug at something nostalgic evoking sunlight. New Music toys with its time signatures but stays accessible, while Sensation IRL is the album’s crowning moment as a finger-picked intro opens into wordless pop-punk euphoria as catchy as any chart single, and it feels like running down a hill too fast. The tones are beautifully produced with warm and welcoming fuzz, and instead of drifting into math-rock’s intellectual cul-de-sac, Totorro aim straight for the heart with a cheery wistfulness. If the bulk of post-rock sounds like watching the world end in slow motion, Sofa So Good sounds like waking up and realising that it was all a dream. Taking the emotional core of post-rock, and rebuilding it with the propulsion of immediate radio rock, Totorro have reclaimed a sense of play and turned the genre back into something joyous built for jumping in unison when the beat drops, proving that instrumental rock can still be fun and euphoric without dumbing itself down.