It’s no secret that the annihilation of rock & roll has been a relentless undertaking in punk circles for half a century now. Chalk it up to volleys of VU-bombed minimalism, Beefheartian abstraction, Stooge-blistered ferocity, and then some, the legion of disciples who’ve come and gone since have made no bones about their contempt for the genre when decimating its legacy with just about everything within arms reach, including the kitchen sink. Hartford’s Magik Markers may only be a fine sliver on this big dish, but over the course of a mountainous pile of releases, the group has defined the idolized logic of rock’s undoing with a noise-fucked consciousness that drifts thru parallels of punk animosity and no-wave disembodiment.

While the Markers have consistently invoked a stylistic mush of amp-scuzzing worship and unbridled fury within its repertoire, there’s also been a spike in more conventional songwriting that’s presented itself on their last pair of releases. The band’s 2007 full-length, BOSS, and 2009 follow-up, Balf Quarry, both displayed an unforeseen, yet blatantly noticeable, swerve in the direction of looser song arrangements that embraced some of, dare I say, rock & roll’s more buttoned-down trappings without shedding any of the sonic arrhythmia or punk zoom that’s been the Markers’ proverbial calling card since forming. Surrender to the Fantasy, the band’s first proper album in four years, is the latest hallmark of their catalog to preserve this formula quite extraordinarily.

The duo of Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan are joined by new member John Shaw (Son of Earth, the Believers) on bass, who fills the sonic vacuum of neo-psych swoosh and white-hot screech with a swarm of low-end huzz on tunes such as “American Sphinx Face” and opening track “Crebs.” The former opens with a wobbly bass line caked in brittle fuzz that sounds as if it’s doomed to amble for eternity. After a couple of measures, Nolan thumps in with a primitive beat as Ambrogio unleashes a head-rush of mummified feedback and ghost-tripping incantations. It’s a sheer death rocker that flutters slowly through barren canyons, moon-scaped forests and parts unknown, guided only by the rhythmic pulse of Nolan and Shaw, as Ambrogio’s cool-spoken gibberish unravels from its psycho-spiritual aura.

On the other hand, the bat-shit “Bonfire” is all stomp and no slumber with its two-chorded hustle and shrill shrieks that recall the smack-scoring sleaze-rock of early Royal Trux. The song scuffs and stumbles along in a primal rampage, before turning up on its gashed skull into the pop-centric wooziness of “Mirrorless,” a sprawling, sonic navigation that puts their placid idiosyncrasies on display for nearly six minutes of gush and shimmer. The dark and dank miasma that engulfs “Screams of Birds and Girls” takes this experimental pop element a step further with its piecing, fractal tones and spooky, soft-sung vocals, while twangy guitar and tribal percussion induce an uncanny sense of ghost town dereliction at some long forgotten saloon during “Acts of Desperation.”

While the production isn’t exactly cleaned up to pristine conditions, the songs of Surrender sound a tad more enriched by not only the inclusion of Shaw, but some self-restraint as well. With an added member thrown into the mix, Ambrogio and Nolan have acquired a beefed-up cohesion that was almost lacking in their arsenal on previous albums, even before Leah Quimby exited the group in 2006. The song “WT” makes light of this progression with its trickling, metallic clang that sauces up the rough-and-tumble edges of the rhythm section. Whereas Ambrogio once may have been inclined to obliterate every last gaping hole of a song in mounds of shrapnel, Shaw’s presence affords her the luxury of punctuating the throbbing, fuzzed-out bass showers with a tamed skronk that retches in magnification only when the time is right. After all, minimum is maximum.