Somewhere on the outskirts of California there’s a version of psychedelic rock that’s unsullied by The Doors’ druggy excess or the nightmare cult of Charles Manson. In those sun-drenched hinterlands the genre’s original kaleidoscopic colours and flower-power communes remain gleaming and idealistic, a paean to love and ever-expanding consciousness. News Of The Universe, the third album from Shana Cleveland’s band La Luz, has unearthed these beginnings to craft a sound of curious optimism and exploration, with lyrics that evoke the aura of someone who’s grown a third eye in the centre of their forehead and loves what it’s showing them.

Its tone is summed up by lead single ‘Strange World’, an insistent guitar cruncher in which Cleveland robotically croons ‘look alive in the strange world/infinite in the strange world.’ Here, the mystery of nature is a sci-fi landscape filled with wonder and surrealism. Combining Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Strange Days without sounding kitschy is a tricky balancing act, yet News Of The Universe manages it deftly, avoiding quirky anachronism by creating a knotted world all of its own.

Beneath its bright-eyed sonics are complicating signs of murk such as the sudden breakdown into fuzz pop of ‘Always In Love’ or a fast-paced freakout for the album’s title track. Then there’s ‘Blue Moth Cloud Shadow’, a whacked-out lovechild of Jefferson Airplane and Phil Spector, or ‘Moon In Reverse’, a droning guitar jam that could have been cribbed from Captain Beefheart’s personal archives; you can almost hear someone blowing the dust off the magnetic tape before they put it on.

Cleveland has called these songs ‘haunted psychedelia’ and you can see what she means; these aren’t pastiches, but the ghosts of an American past inhabiting the present. Each is an echo through time, rebounding into 2024 with the clatter of a band reconfiguring music history for their own ecstatic vision.

La Luz: News Of The Universe is released on Sub Pop on Friday 24 May; main picture: Ginger Fierstein.