Since I don’t do drugs, I think the most psychedelic experience I’ve ever had was when I let go of a balloon outside for the first time and watched it rise into the air until it turned into a tiny dot and disappeared. It made no sense to me that a balloon would do that and nothing else would, and I wondered where it ended up — if it was in space or if it crashed on an island somewhere. As a kid, it might have been the first thing that made me start to ponder the depths of the universe and realize how little I knew about it.

Now that I am something resembling an adult, I have no use for balloons. If someone came up to me on the street and handed me one, I would say “why are you giving me this balloon.” If they insisted on me taking on the burden of the balloon, I would walk around with it for awhile out of some weird sense of guilt, then eventually get tired of having to hold the string and let it go because I don’t care about the environment. And as the balloon rose up, I wouldn’t think about how cool it was that this object was floating into space. I would think “yeah balloons do that because of helium or science or whatever.”

Trish Keenan either never stopped being fascinated by balloons or found a way to channel that sense of kid wonder through her music. As easy as it is to feel depressed about her death while listening to Broadcast, on Haha Sound the predominant feeling I get is joy. “Lunch Hour Pops” might be their most overtly happy-sounding song — it’s like a nursery rhyme with her sing-song vocals plus the chirping electronics, and includes the refrain “let the balloons go outside.” It’s an ambiguous psychedelic image that also captures the band’s approach to making this album.

Haha Sound is a pop music carnival where every song is like a different exhibition that shows the listener something new. There is the cotton candy girl-group inspired “Before We Begin,” the spiky sci-fi rock of “Pendulum,” the warm, affecting shoegaze of the last two tracks, “Winter Now” and “Hawk.” If there was a criticism to be aimed at The Noise Made By People (there wasn’t, but speaking theoretically here), it’s that it was very focused on a specific minimal aesthetic. Haha Sound feels like a reaction to that: it’s Broadcast at their most maximalist, and the joy comes from hearing the band explore every possible texture and sound they can come up with while still combining all of that weirdness with timeless pop songwriting.

This would be the last Broadcast album before it reduced to a duo of Keenan and James Cargill, probably because it used up every idea they had for the full band. Neil Bullock’s drumming is worth singling out because the rhythms on this album are really creative and make every song on Haha Sound feel distinct. “Man is Not a Bird” is his best showcase; its dense sound and the textures he provides make it a significant departure from TNMBP while maintaining all of the band’s strengths.

Keenan sits at the center of these kaleidoscopic pop fantasies, observing the strange world around her with a sense of awe and wonder. Whether it’s Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, or Valerie and her Week of Wonders, there is something about the concept of the ordinary woman in a fantasy land that resonates, and she inhabits that role on Haha Sound perfectly. She adds such relatability to the band’s psychedelic sounds and visuals, like on “Ominous Cloud,” where the titular image is used to convey trying to overcome self-doubt and procrastination like all of us do.

While I’ve always loved Haha Sound, it didn’t emotionally connect with me as much as Broadcast’s other music until I started listening to it repeatedly in the last few weeks. Lately, I’ve been more into music that can take me back to my old balloon-loving self while still treading new ground, and this album’s unjaded sound appeals to me now more than ever. I’ve also been asking myself what makes this band’s music ageless, and I think it lies in its mix of classic pop songwriting and malleable lyrics, themes, and sounds. No matter where I’m at in life, I’ll be able to find something in Haha Sound that makes me feel and sparks my imagination.

Broadcast had a wide range of esoteric influences in many different mediums, but one that comes up over and over again in interviews is the 1970 Czech film Valerie and her Week of Wonders. It’s a surrealist fairy tale about a 13-year old named Valerie who is becoming a woman. She has magical earrings which lead to a bizarre and frightening story involving a creepy priest, her vampire grandma, a polecat, and a boy who loves her and may or may not be her brother. The film raises many interesting questions like “what is this,” “what am I watching” and “isn’t that guy dead.”

Regardless of the actual quality of the film, it’s easy to see why it inspired Trish Keenan. Broadcast’s music always had a fairy tale feeling with Keenan’s voice playing the Valerie role of innocence amid the strange electronic fantasies they created. A lot of the imagery in Valerie and her Week of Wonders is the type of uncanny beauty that was Broadcast’s trademark. Another direct influence is Lubos Fiser’s lush soundtrack, which at times feels like a precursor to Broadcast’s sound.

After the smooth elegance of The Noise Made By People, Broadcast leaned further into the Valerie inspiration on Haha Sound, marking a departure for the band which would be typical from record to record. The space of TNMBP is replaced with tons of texture in the form of diverse percussion sounds, buzzing electronics, and other clatter. It puts Keenan in the center of a musical fantasy that is reminiscent of the film’s surreal imagery. They don’t exactly hide this: one song is called “Valerie” and borrows the melody from Fiser’s soundtrack while Keenan sings about the magical earrings.

“Valerie” stands out as one of the prettiest songs in Broadcast’s discography with its gentle strumming and Keenan’s innocent performance of Fiser’s melody. It also is a testament to how good they were at repurposing art that inspired them into music that fit their own sound. I loved this song before I even knew what Valerie and her Week of Wonders was, and I never even watched the movie until a few days ago. Understanding where some of this band’s ideas came from adds a layer of appreciation to it, but isn’t necessary at all.

I suspect the band would quite enjoy that I ended up watching the movie because of their music. Part of Broadcast’s charm was that they came off as so enthusiastic about their influences, and they used their music to try to get listeners interested in art they felt was meaningful. What I’m still discovering in their music now are little reference points that I never recognized as someone who hasn’t ventured into a lot of the areas Keenan was obsessed with. They function almost as easter eggs that make the band into cool friends that turn you onto stuff you wouldn’t have found on your own.

The sincerity of their love for Valerie and her Week of Wonders is why the band borrowing the melody for “Valerie” feels like such a thoughtful homage when in other hands it could have been perceived as an act of theft. It’s the band resurrecting this old, forgotten piece of art and bringing it into conversation with the present and the future. The term “retro-futurism” kind of sounds like music writer babble, but “Valerie” is a direct example of it, where the past, present, and future all collide in one song. The rest of Haha Sound finds similar joy in linking different eras in a way that Broadcast did better than everyone else.

“Look Outside,” the ninth track on The Noise Made By People, only has two lines of lyrics: “I look outside and wherever I go you are there. You color in the every day wherever I go.” The rest of the song is instrumental, with a keyboard, a light guitar part, and splashing cymbals joined by Trish Keenan’s wordless voice that blends into the sound. It’s constructed in a way to make the listener ponder those simple words and what they might mean. It could just be a love song, but it also describes one of the core principles behind Broadcast’s music: the idea of psychedelia as a way to elevate the ordinary.

That theme is conveyed on this album through music that is consciously accessible and basic on the surface. Especially compared to their future releases, nothing that happens here is too complicated and the songs tend to stick to familiar pop structures. The lyrics in particular are written in a very elementary vocabulary with a lot of one-syllable words. The opening track,”Long was the Year,” introduces the band’s strategic use of brevity with lyrics like “be like the sun/never gone” and “sleep long and fast/let the past be the past.” This approach to language emphasizes the sing-songy qualities of Keenan’s voice while also being much more psychedelic and thought-provoking than many bands that write overly complex lyrics.

Keenan understood that the best art is the type that goes “off the page” and isn’t easily explained. The brief lyrics on The Noise Made By People are like sketches that hint at certain emotions or feelings, but are left to be fully colored in by the listener. This sort of ambiguity is a gift: it allows people to project themselves onto the music and to find their own way through the space that the band creates. It’s the key to why this is one of the most enduring albums I listen to and why I consider it a classic.

In an interview with Wired (which I’ll be using a lot because it has so many good Trish quotes), Keenan outlined how she views psychedelia as “a door through to another way of thinking about sound and song. Not a world only reachable by hallucinogens but obtainable by questioning what we think is real and right, by challenging the conventions of form and temper.” And that seems to be a particular focus on this album, which I usually describe in oxymoronic terms. It’s electronic but deeply human, it’s simple and yet so complex, and it sounds like the past and the future at the same time.

It made me reconsider certain preconceptions that I had about psychedelic music. I always assumed it meant there would be 10-minute songs that used words like “cosmotronic.” Broadcast proved that a whole world could be opened up through three-minute pop songs. It inspired me as a writer, the way the band sounded so smart and communicated such complex ideas through simple, unpretentious language — that’s something I aspire to. It made me appreciate electronic music, which I had previously written off almost entirely because I didn’t think I could connect to it like I did with this.

I already wrote about “Come On Let’s Go” and “Echo’s Answer,” which are the two opposite ends of the spectrum on this album. The rest of the songs occupy a space in between those extremes, combining beguiling pop and gentle psychedelia. It’s a style that usually gets labeled as “dream pop,” but Broadcast’s music is more about conscious thought than dreaming. The Noise Made By People tingles the brain in a way that few albums do — it’s a joy to listen to because of its songwriting and can be pondered for eternity without being completely solved.

Thus far I’ve been snubbing Trish Keenan’s bandmates (James Cargill, Roj Stevens, Tim Felton, Steve Perkins), but they shine on this album, especially given that surprisingly little of it features her voice. That outro on “Look Outside” is their best moment, but they also play a trio of instrumentals (“Minus One,” “Tower of Our Tuning,” and the finale “Dead the Long Year”) that add some pacing and texture to the album. And while Keenan’s voice and delivery has natural psychedelic qualities, a lot of that comes out in the retro-futuristic sound, which was inspired by eerie 60s groups but still feels like something no one else has caught up to.

“Unchanging Window” is one of the other songs on this album that is definitively Broadcast. It has that vague intangible quality that “Echo’s Answer” does while also being catchy in its own way with another memorable instrumental outro. The titular window goes back to the motif on “Look Outside” that runs through this album: the idea of seeing and thinking differently through music. The window doesn’t change, but what you perceive through it does.

Poppy songs like “City in Progress” and “Papercuts” contribute to making this Broadcast’s most accessible album. That is often said in a snobbish and dismissive way, but the elegance and listenability of The Noise Made By People strengthen its themes and make it an album that will endure forever, as long as people get the chance to hear it. Anyone who finds it will get the ultimate musical experience: an album that opens your eyes and makes you see the world differently.