Are Brooklyn’s Purelink a boy band or a jam band? Well, they’re neither; they’re three former Chicagoans making ambient music in the Y2K-era clicks + cuts tradition, yet those faintly disingenuous tags actually say a lot about what sets them apart from their forebears. Guys like Oval, Pole, Jan Jelinek and Vladislav Delay carried themselves with modesty, reserve, and dry Northern European humor; they didn’t seem like people you’d necessarily want to have a beer with. Purelink, meanwhile, are the kind of band you’d want to be in: three 30-year-olds with impeccable music taste and even better networking skills, driving south every year to link up with artists like Ulla and Huerco S. at Kansas City’s C- parties.

This sense of eagerness and irrepressible youth, the kind you’d associate more with a sparky young rock band like Friko than three guys wired into their laptops, shines through on their second album, Faith. They’re not interested in the unreadability and weirdness that led a lot of their predecessors to name their tracks after snippets of data and cryptic non-words. They prefer bright timbres and billowing chords rather than the spaciousness their forebears inherited from dub, cocooning the stereo field in midrange pad noise. The album caps at 38 minutes, far shorter than a CD-era sprawler.

A lot of this can be attributed to the simple fact that they’re a band; there weren’t a lot of those in the clicks + cuts era. The sunniness of their approach can also be attributed to the way they treat ambient music as something communal, rather than the solitary, private practice of many laptop scientists. While the only guest on their 2023 debut, Signs, was the cryptic J, Faith features a conspicuous appearance from Loraine James, whose voice imparts a whisper of spliffy trip-hop paranoia on “Rookie,” while on “First Iota,” poet Angelina Nonaj muses on beauty and artifice as guitars slash angrily across the space.

That Purelink are so good at replicating the precise sounds of the ’90s and ’00s only emphasizes what differentiates them from their inspirations. Huerco must have passed them some tricks of the trade, because no record since his own Railroad Blues EP in 2015 better reverse-engineers the pneumatic snaps Vladislav Delay perfected on his four–album 2000 run: a sound kind of like a methane bubble escaping an ice thaw, or someone smacking an exercise ball in a diving bell. “Kite Scene” undergirds its reluctant chord plucks with a schaffel beat, folding Wolfgang Voigt’s glam-rock-enamored take on techno into their circle of influences.