When did getting a job require having an up-to-date LinkedIn profile? And how is that even possible if we’re constantly distracting ourselves with a Facebook timeline or pouring over a Twitter feed in search of the best clickbait to consume? Has the smartphone become a necessary organ of our being, so much so that anxiety takes over whenever we can’t reach out to it at anytime?

It’s in the context of this burgeoning ADD society that Parquet Courts alter-ego Parkay Quarts discuss our deep intimacy with our “Pretty Machines” and their own anxieties concerning 21st century culture. On Content Nausea (What’s Your Rupture?), the second record out this year from the Parquet/Parkay crew, this theme is acutely explored. Content Nausea becomes a commentary on New York City—the city where Andrew Savage and Austin Brown, the members carried-over from Parquet Courts, reside—and how it has devolved from its pre–Freedom Tower era in this fashion. (The album cover shows the landmark surrounded by what is presumably content.)

The title track provides a proper abstract to Savage’s thesis here, if not a list of grievances. Above a galloping guitar rhythm and a droning violin reminiscent John Cale’s on “Heroin,” Savage suggests that as a result of technological progress, we are drowning in content and “overpopulated by nothing, crowded by sparseness,” resulting in disconnect and loss: “For this year it became… harder to remember meeting a friend, writing a letter… All lost to the ceremony of progress.”

Content Nausea documents the very concept of being lost, how the important and personal have become muddled by content. The record embodies that decline, as on “Urban Ease,” “Kevlar Walls,” and “Psycho Structures,” only to have its energy and interest sparked again sporadically by “Pretty Machines” and a dour cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots.” The idea that one can be content with content while simultaneously becoming disoriented remains the same throughout the peculiar segues and The Strokes-heavy post-punk rockers. (This inconsistency ends up being the distinguishing characteristic of Content Nausea from the members’ previous work, including the other Parkay Quarts release, last year’s Tally All the Things That You Broke EP.)

Slow-burner and apt closer “Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth” bleeds Content Nausea’s anxiety dry. Savage takes on the role of full-fledged, folk troubadour here, pontificating on the cognitive dissonance between how we ought to navigate society and how we actually do (through technology). We, alongside Parkay Quarts, are aware of it too, taking on a pressure-less guilt in not doing anything to thwart this empty evolution.