With last year’s self-titled debut, London’s Toy showed the kind of honest to goodness promise that seems more and more rare to hear in these days of rampant hipster phonies. A swirl of motorik beats and shoegaze haze that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on 4AD during its heyday, the record hit all the right synapses, while at the same time also leaving the door open for great things to come.

Arriving sooner than later, Toy’s follow-up, Join the Dots (Heavenly Recordings), is 11 tracks seemingly designed to jump in where Toy left off. But while there is certainly the same kind of lysergic influences at work, this record seems somehow more immediate—even on tracks like the eight-minute long title song. The band has trimmed away the extra obfuscation so that each vortex of guitars has a tighter orbit. This slight MO change is most obvious on “As We Turn,” a four-minute cut in which phased-out guitars are shaped into a melodic hum that hover behind singer Tom Dougall’s murmurs. Similarly, the coiled mix of “Endlessly” comes off like Loveless boiled down to its essential parts.

Nevertheless, it is the moments where Toy stretches out (as on the aforementioned title track) that are epiphanous. “Conductor” opens the record momentously in a building push-and-pull between oscillating synths and a chugging guitar riff.  “Fall Out of Love” closes the record with that same kind of momentum, the band building a wall of sound to perhaps dismantle some time in the foreseeable future.