Cloaking their output in a black-lit, by-the-power-of-Grey-Skull aesthetic, Australian ensemble King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard set the bar fairly high for themselves in terms of delivering beyond the surface level bells and whistles of psychedelic music. And though the band’s propulsive, chooglin’ space rock certainly doesn’t come out of leftfield—having both obvious predecessors as well as contemporaries who beat them to the punch—they’ve more over or less delivered over the course of their relatively brief existence.

On 2014’s I’m in Your Mind Fuzz, the band offered a molten psychedelic maelstrom that was kept in check by the kind of precision that marks American bands such as Wooden Shjips or Thee Oh-Sees. (Comparisons to the latter shouldn’t be too surprising given that Oh-Sees frontman John Dwyer’s Castle Face label is the band’s American home.) Yet despite a respectable grasp on their chosen style and a commendable level of consistency, one could easily imagine King Gizzard’s at times heavy-handed acid rock wearing thin, owing in no small part to the fact that they’re producing records at a Dwyer-like clip. That’s one of the reasons why the band’s four-song EP, Quarters, comes as such as pleasant surprise.

Clocking in at more than 40 minutes, with each track a precise 10 minutes and 10 seconds, Quarters finds King Gizzard pumping the breaks on their relentless space trucking, slowing down the groove, and opening up a bit. If previous releases revealed the band channeling their inner Hawkwind, Quarters evokes the steady rolling psychedelic experience of, say, Quicksilver Messenger Service. And at its most supremely toasted, the album can even recall the kind of absent-minded nonchalance of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name—if that album were recorded under the supervision of Dave Fridmann and Kid Millions. Throughout Quarters, undulating guitar licks skitter across drums that point to the jazzier moments of krautrock’s eternal beat, while warped keyboards and all manner of synthetic sounds and samples push the songs to sun-kissed pinnacles. There are heavily treated vocals, and they’re an essential aspect of the overall effect, but they’re merely one single part of a whole and are given no more attention in the mix than any other instrument. Which is fine, because even when the lyrics are intelligible they offer the kind of “wow brah” revelations that become less intriguing as the drugs wear off. But let’s not quibble.

For all of King Gizzard’s retro psychedelic trappings, their sound is very much rooted in contemporary music culture. That said, it’s tough to avoid using the dreaded “J word” when describing a band that plays the kind of stuff found on Quarters. But perhaps we’re far enough moved from the heyday of that unfortunate final gasp of hippie excess to go ahead and label King Gizzard just that­: a jam band. King Gizzard—winning back the term one 10-minute hit of musical orange sunshine at a time.