Tera Melos & Speedy Ortiz at Club Downunder

Melding the aggression of punk with the technical intricacies of prog rock, Tera Melos use jerky shifts in time signatures and disjointed guitar noodling bearing a close resemblance to Don Caballero and Hella. Like their counterparts in complicated rock, finger-tapped guitar parts are the centerpiece, complemented by angular bass riffs and splintered spazz-jazz drumming, but contrasting dynamics are a bigger focus of the band’s songs, with ambient electronics and sparse vocal lines occasionally incorporated into the interludes to offset some of the more convoluted and noisier sections.

Attention came swiftly following Speedy Ortiz’s 2012 Sports EP on the Boston-centric label Exploding In Sound, and with good reason. Massachusetts-based songwriter/guitarist Sadie Dupuis’ knotty, lyrically dense songs were fully realized by her bandmates. After the success of its 2013 Best New Music-honored debut full-length Major Arcana, the band formalized its assault through a year and a half of relentless touring with bands in whose brainy-slash-brawny legacies it followed—among them Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Ex Hex, and The Breeders.

Speedy Ortiz’s second proper album—Foil Deer, recorded at Rare Book Room in Brooklyn when the band wasn’t pushing forward on its hectic 2014 tour schedule—came out on April 21, 2015. The songs represent a leap forward, possessing a lightness that mirrors Dupuis’s post-grad school outlook; they also have a deliberate nature to them, one that emanates from extra studio time and more experimentation with the band’s essential form.