Ben Schneider has spent his career so far steering Lord Huron through the American West. Not the Old West, necessarily, though Schneider went so far as to invent an imaginary series of Western adventure novels as part of the backstory for Lonesome Dreams, the band’s 2012 debut. The old days of horse rustlers, bandits, and broad-shouldered sheriffs are part of that mythos, of course, but Schneider is at least as interested in evoking the setting as telling the stories on Lord Huron’s latest. The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 is their most compelling effort so far, and first since 2021’s Long Lost and a surge in online popularity—thanks, mostly, to the band’s 2015 track “The Night We Met” becoming a viral audio on TikTok (it has since amassed more than 3 billion streams).