“As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve. The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet everybody rushes around in great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” Ron Gallo recites these words in a flat, matter-of-fact way midway through his track “Always Elsewhere” from 2018’s Stardust Birthday Party. And while the here-and-now mentality of that statement can be heard in a litany of genres, Gallo proudly brings this philosophical bent to the garage-rock scene. In the tradition of Hüsker Dü and, more recently, Ty Segall, Gallo filters his thoughtful lyrics through rough-edged rock. Stardust Birthday Party also marks his second release of 2018. His prior output (the Really Nice Guys EP) focused on Gallo’s own experiences in the music scene, with aptly titled tunes like “I’m on the Guestlist” and “Emotional Impact for Sale.” Stardust Birthday Party, on the other hand, poses far more important questions. Using Gallo’s own words (as told to Relix in a recent interview) this LP asks, “What’s your relationship with your own mind? How are you treating people? How are you contributing to the world around you?” They’re all crucial questions, and to ask them with a wailing guitar in the background is more provocative than ever. Even album-closer “Happy Deathday,” with its eerie, downtempo existentialism, is inherently rockand-roll: “When the alien came to visit me/ The first thing that he said to me/ Was ‘What the fuck happened to all of you?’” Pretty trippy, indeed.