At George’s Zoo—Cool Ghouls’ fourth LP and most fully realized collection of songs yet—opens with “It’s Over,” a mediation on the power of live music and life in limbo. “Smoke & Fire” and “Land Song,” meanwhile, address California’s ever-raging wildfires through the haze of some choice Aquarian apocalyptic imagery. Yet, though the psych-rock quartet—bassist Pat Thomas, guitarists Pat McDonald and Ryan Wong, and drummer Alex Fleshman—actually finished those numbers in early 2019, well before the world stopped turning, Thomas explains that the songs still apply to what’s happening today. In fact, he believes that the pandemic merely brought many social and ecological issues that had actually been around for decades to the forefront. “Sadly, it’s kind of an evergreen message these days,” Thomas says, zeroing in on the carcinogenic groover “Smoke & Fire.” “There was a fire going on when I wrote it, another fire when we were recording it and then, when we were getting ready to put it out, there was another.” But At George’s Zoo isn’t all mutually assured destruction either. On “Side B,” Cool Ghouls breeze through a cycle of sunshine-pop numbers, including cheeky Beach Boys tributes like “Surfboard” and “Look in Your Mirror,” along with instant stoner classics like“Feel Like Getting High.” “The line between homage and parody, that’s something that Frank Zappa and The Mothers did a lot,” Thomas says. “It might be a little more common on the West Coast, but we’re definitely not alone in celebrating this style of music.” However, Thomas is quick to point out that The Ghouls aren’t just blind ‘60s music devotees—they all fully understand that the decade’s steady, heady output of incredible tunes was actually born out of a social and economic climate that can’t ever be fully recaptured. “I view what happened in the music industry to be parallel with what happened more broadly with this neoliberal turn of financialization in every industry,” he says. “So the way that records were produced back then can’t really be replicated now, even just in the way that labels had their own studios. That era of music is when the fruit was the ripest on the vine.”