MINKS, ‘Tides End’

“Forget about weekdays in 1982/ You know you don’t see the same things we do,” sings MINKS’ Sonny Kilfoyle in the sunny “Weekenders.” This summery chorus is also a warning that rolls in like a rain cloud: Nostalgia can only go so far. Despite so many reminders of the past, we’re stuck with the present. It’s a tension that runs through “Tides End” — which he wrote in the East End of Long Island — and it plays well against its slack, throwback pop. The songs drift between familiar buoys of Echo & the Bunnymen and Simple Minds (with producer Mark Verbos lending more electronic thump than was heard on 2011’s “By the Hedge”), but it’s a tenuous comfort, a listlessness that feels endangered. From the summer’s end reassurances of “Everything’s Fine” to the melancholy vignette of “Playboys of the Western World” (where Kilfoyle sounds like a lonely Pet Shop Boy), “Tides End” breaks the bad news as though it were good. Even the perfect sweet nothing of “Margot” only feels like a flash of sunshine on an album that sweeps through like the first brisk gust of fall. (Out Tuesday)

ESSENTIAL “Margot”