A combination of two Texans and two Brits, this international quartet creates baroque pop that’s impatient and maddening, explosive and impossible to pigeonhole. Taking a page from the Flaming Lips playbook and injecting a manic scenery change at every pause, the Earlies transcend the bucolic haze of their debut album — a collection of EPs named These Were the Earlies — and dive into a studio experimentalism that will leave your head swimming. The title track trudges along to a slow, driving beat, slightly staggered harmonies and the sound of synthesizers and phase shifters programmed into overdrive. If it’s possible to crossfade the quirky adventurism of the Soft Machine with the synthesized stillness of Talk Talk, this might be where you’d arrive. “The Ground We Walk On” is a static ballad that could be a singer-songwriter hijacked by a computer programming team, as the song’s plaintive melody is augmented by the sound of space travel. The eerie sturm und drang of “Bad Is As Bad Does” makes a strong case that they’re chipping away at the clichés with an expert hand.