(Cheesehead Records, digital) What a difference eight years makes. In 2016, Benjamin Burr was a teenage jam-band kid making sweet, teenage jam-band-kid music with some pals from central Vermont under the name Peace in the Valley. Though solid, the music was safe, largely sticking to the genre's tropes (i.e., love and togetherness plus noodling guitars). Flash forward to 2024: Burr, now a skilled producer, makes records with his musical soulmate and wife, Sara Primo, and, Primo explained by email, their "platonic third wheel [yet] absolutely integral" bandmate Griffin Crafts as Winooski's Cady Ternity. A bit like Jamaica, Vt., duo Luminous Crush, the trio specializes in shape-shifting, pop-centric music that's hard to pin down. Though 21st-century anxiety recurs throughout their lyrics, Cady Ternity always aim to make music "in a way that made us shake our a$$es," Primo continued. Their cleverly titled new album, On & On Anon, follows their 2023 debut, The New Direction, with bigger swings, bolder ideas and riskier stylistic choices. The result is colorful, mysterious, a little bit funny and occasionally dark. It's one of the best Vermont records of the year. Cady Ternity have many faces. Opener "Always Open/Never Free" delivers a spacey, late-era Police groove. R&B sizzler "Khaki Car" thumps like an Erykah Badu/Snoop Dogg collab. Slinky trip-hop jam "2 Glib" features hefty manipulation of Primo's vocals, resulting in a disorienting flavor that recalls Róisín Murphy's defunct outfit Moloko. "Just 1" sounds like bossa nova icon Astrud Gilberto went full electro-pysch. Coming closer to a rock sound than elsewhere on the record, "The Cost of Cream" lays bare relatable uncertainty about the future. Wrapped in wonderful interplay between keys and guitar, the song's lead character, the hypothetical 51-year-old Jill, struggles with FOMO, her health and loneliness. "Jill is worrying / About the cost of cream / She doesn't wear sunscreen," the band sings in multi-decker harmonies. These seemingly unrelated facts create a beautiful irony that touches on late-stage capitalism and the climate crisis. Like many Americans, Jill sees rising prices at the grocery store as a harbinger of doom yet dismisses environmental collapse (a major factor in what's driving up those doggone prices). Perhaps we're all a little bit Jill as we dwell on certain horrors while ignoring others. It's these kinds of observations, embedded in tight and tantalizing pop production, that make Cady Ternity's an essential new Vermont voice. On & On Anon…