Western Massachusetts indie rock impurists Bucket return from a nine-year hiatus with Buy Now, Pay Later, a four-song EP that tours the predatory all-tension, no-release culture of 2026. The band favors a lush, deep-pocket Americana-rock akin to Neil Young in the early ‘70s, or Wilco and others in the present day. The songs of Will Meyer — equal parts fragmented, observational critique and inchoate, old-world longing — find resonant support in these organic performances, the kind of empathic ensemble playing that can only come from long and complicated relationships.

Flashing back to 2013, Meyer phoned drummer Ryan Severin: “Hey man, do you want to come over tonight and write a grunge record front to back?” The eventual output of that lark, the EP Bouquet (Sad Cactus, 2017), isolated the Bucket sound that is still very much intact today. In 2026, the band reassembled in Los Angeles to record Buy Now, Pay Later and its companion EP, July’s Beyond the Pail. The EPs contain some of the accidental baroque of Pavement alongside a sensuously lagging, vintage feel that the band share with contemporaries like MJ Lenderman and Greg Freeman.

Classic only in its two-guitar, bass and drums instrumentation, Bucket plies its own agnostic and irreverent style. From the first, Weezer-nodding notes of “Untouchable” to the intricate filigree of the album closing honkey tonk rocker “Victors,” the non-idiomatic, sweet-and-sour twang of lead guitarist Gage Lyons remains Bucket’s chief source of unpredictability and surprise, darting with imagination and unfailing panache around the covert melodicism of Meyer’s speak-sing.

While the EP’s only truly doctrinal country-rock moment is the timeless “Rare Bird,” the ghosts of Gram Parsons and Gene Clark haunt the sound throughout, most explicitly in the yearning pedal steel of guest artist Connor “Catfish” Gallaher, a frequent collaborator of Bucket bassist Eli Salus-Kleiner. The question is whether Meyer, an involuntarily incisive cultural critic and humorist, can play by those classicist rules. The answer is yes, absolutely, and of course not.

Meyer builds a lyrical world here as comfortable with the antique, the hurt, and the heartfelt (“I know the heart is a rare bird searching”) as with the painfully current (“In this economy, we all keep lurking for love/that we can charge on a credit card, when we only have one bar.”) In one of the record’s keynote lines (in the song “Victors”) Meyer finds a contemporary tragic hero and villain in the same family, referencing the late Silver Jews frontman David Berman and his estranged arch-capitalist, lobbyist father in a moment that inverts all definitions of losers and winners.

Buy Now, Pay Later emerges as a coming of age story from a quartet of college mates in the Pioneer Valley, each of whom might have pursued any number of professional paths but who, at every turn, kept that space open for music. In the Pay Later part of that phase, they find themselves approaching middle age in the sickening milieu of influencer culture, sleaze capitalism, the dubious veracity of everything, and the rising tide of American-branded fascism. Buy Now, Pay Later roots its sadness, its panic, and its hope in the act of playing good old fashioned rock music with some highly skilled friends.