The Midnight Juggernauts are a strangely awesome Australian trio, melding big beats with progressive and psychedelic tinges, but smart enough to keep everything within a pop context. Their new album, The Crystal Axis, is a self-released effort, which would explain why it has less of the Daft Punk-ish thump that drove their 2008 debut Dystopia. It’s also a bit more challenging, opting for darker territory than they covered first time around. There is one standout upbeat pop moment, though, and it is the strangely titled “Lara Versus the Savage Pack.” Armed with one of those earworm keyboard riffs – this writer’s three-year-old son was singing the keyboard hook when the song recently played at dinner – and a positively explosive finale, “Lara Versus the Savage Pack” is the first song we’ve heard in years that made us want to go to a club just so we could dance to it with a hundred other people and watch them climb the walls at song’s end. Put on your dancing shoes, kids.

UPDATE: It figures that the week after I post this, the band finally releases the official video. So here it is.

Midnight Juggernauts – Lara Vs The Savage Pack from midnight juggernauts on Vimeo.