If DRKWAV becomes nothing more than a musical footnote for the most aptly named band in history, it will be a shame because their freshman effort, The Purge, is a deliciously dark piece of work. It’s gloriously dark, troublingly dark, dark dark. The self-referential opening track has a bass line that sounds like a dungeon, but not a medieval one. This is the dungeon from the never-made sequel to Brazil. This is Kafka’s penal colony as written by Jeff Noon. This dungeon is full of blinking lights and pneumatic exhalations. This dungeon has nine circles of sonic darkness that twist and turn and tangle. It’s cyberpunk and meditative and unsentimental.

“Datura” begins with a robot sea monster from hell mauling the innocent before being slang shot forward by John Medeski and Adam Deitch’s hard psych funk. An old reel is found and for a while we’re watching a dark and scary black and white science fiction movie. In the final act the saxophone blasts through time and space; within the sheets of sound and out of the surrealistic swirl of mooginess comes the acoustic piano, naked and psychedelic. The horn’s wail picks you up and places you at the Village Vanguard in the 60s, Coltrane on the bill. “Datura” comes straight out of a David Lynch movie. It’s such a poisonously good track you’ll start a petition to force these three to work with each other exclusively.

Skerik’s howl flows easy at the center of Deitch’s hypnotic-robotic beats and Medeski’s surging whirls of sound. The Purge is not so much a collection of tracks but a mood. It’s Stoker’s Dracula and Broch’s The Sleepwalkers and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. It’s dark and cool simultaneously. It’s the background and the foreground. “Shmeeans Kuti” could ride easy on any number of 70s soul jazz albums, but the depth of Medeski’s solo and the polyrhythmic punch of this super-tight trio is guaranteed to put this track into The Real Book. Musical dexterity can be a powerful vehicle for emotion when handled by these three, but truth be told DRKWAV could turn into another Oysterhead: a band everyone wants to see but no one ever does because their members have other “projects.”

Listening to the track “Gazzelloni” it occurred to me there might be a solution to this problem. Adam Deitch and Billy Martin (Medeski’s “other” drummer) need to do a tour together, but why stop there? Why not have all the bands these three are in go on one big tour together? Lettuce and MMW and Scofield and every single band Skerik is in and maybe Maceo Parker just for fun. That may be far-fetched, but the more I listen to The Purge the more I think that—someway, somehow—these three will do fifty nights a year. The Purge is a clear indicator that there will be some dark and funky nights on DRKWAV’s short February tour.

Whenever the track “Hell Bass” comes on my six-week-old daughter gets this look on her face like she’s staring into the infinite oblivion, and that is exactly what the track sounds like. That is exactly what this album sounds like. It’s rare that an album can cause your sense of wonder to be unleashed back to your consciousness’s infancy, but that’s what The Purge does. Its darkness may be dark, but its sounds are an addiction worth having. Its shapes and symbols may be strange, but its captivating potential is unworldly.