With "Crooked Wing," These New Puritans ticks all the boxes.

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Six years after their last release, the British brother duo returns with a vibrant fifth album, blending pastoral, even mystical sounds, industrial din and darkness.

Twins Jack and George Barnett, with their chic sacristan looks, play a role that has no equal. (Hedi Slimane)

A choirboy's soprano, a cathedral organ, bells that tinkle to ecstatic hypnosis: the fifth album by the English band These New Puritans, Crooked Wing, initially gives the sensation of being sucked into the haunting medieval night of a lost crypt. Twins Jack and George Barnett, with the look of chic sacristans made beautiful by Hedi Slimane, have been playing a score for twenty years that has no equal, and which they burn moreover with each album to rewrite the rules and reshape the sonic order.

If the previous album, Inside the Rose, released six years ago, ended with a cherub's voice, exactly as Crooked Wing begins, the duo this time renounces treading on the well-trodden ground of a Depeche Mode stuck in a suit to open up a new sensory field that belongs only to them, resuming the work where Field of Reeds (their 2013 masterpiece) left off. Graham Sutton, from the Essex veterans of Bark Psychosis, is back on production, while the omnipresent Caroline Polachek puts in a guest appearance on the graceful Industrial Love Song, after offering her services by email. Crooke