Billy Iuso was one of the first local musicians to really get busy during the pandemic; he started doing livestreams in spring 2020 and returned to live gigs as soon as there were any. He used a lot of the downtime to stockpile songs—and while his new album isn’t specifically about lockdown, it does stir up a lot of the emotions that surfaced during that time.

52 Hz hangs together as a loose concept album about staring down hard times and getting past them. The mood alternates between lowdown desperation and dogged optimism. The best tracks, like the slow burn opener “My Getaway” and the uplifting “Look Inside,” evince a bit of both. While many of the songs are recent, Iuso reaches back to his old band Brides of Jesus for “Who’s Gonna Set You Free”—which adds some punchy horns and lead guitar—and finds room for “Strongest Child,” an anthemic number by his late songwriting partner Jaik Miller. Closing out the disc is “It’s Gonna Be Ok,” a self-explanatory song that Anders Osborne wrote a couple decades ago for his then-partner Theresa Andersson to sing. It’s a fine song that was overdue for revival, and Iuso provides the soulful treatment it calls for.

As usual, Iuso puts his songwriting forward on disc and saves the funky and jammy material for concerts. But the disc does show off the chemistry of a band that’s been together for a while, with himself on guitar, Eddie Christmas on drums, Joe Ashlar on keys and Radiators’ bassist Reggie Scanlan (who gets more chances to step forward with melodic bass parts than he usually does in the Rads). They’ve also absorbed a lot of musical history: The instrumental “Rains of Oaxaca” sounds like something Ry Cooder might have done in his heyday, and that’s not a comparison I get to trot out often enough.