From the opening seconds of the title track of Alkaline Trio’s seventh studio album This Addiction, it appears the Chicago-bred threesome may have found the place its entire career has been leading.

While the album’s opener blazes at a tempo reminiscent of the band’s 1998 debut Goddamnit and features a signature Matt Skiba lyric of fatal co-dependency, the whole affair feels strangely... comfortable? By the time second track “Dine, Dine My Darling”--if you don’t get the joke, it’s probably not worth explaining—kicks in with Dan Andriano providing his traditionally lighter foil to Skiba’s obsidian musings, it’s clear: Alkaline Trio has settled into an unforeseeable maturity—at least by Alkaline Trio standards—and it suits them just fine.