This record has got a hard task. The Festivus season is over, everyone's joy banks are as depleted as their actual banks, and all that fresh fallen snow is crunching into black ice with every step towards work we'd forgotten existed.

So to recreate the ecstatic summer bounce of their eponymous debut was never going to be easy. But it sounds like it was. Easy. Skipping. Smart casual. It's not more of the same, but the spirit and joy are still there in spades.

The sound palette is expanded, there's a less rigid adherence to a Capetown time signature (although they do still convey that bounding gleefulness without a hint of phoniness), but this is still Vampire Weekend's world. Wes Anderson's bored, beatific rich kids, not the teeth-grinding empty horrors of Bret Easton Ellis. Cousins tears at you from the off, their first attempt at a 4/4 stomp still sounding entirely themselves (with maybe some Violent Femmes mania thrown in). Horchata is more playful and music-box, littered, like the rest of the album, with Ezra Koenig's chocolate-box delight in language, words and phrases. California English mirrors the babbling-brook guitar with a lightly autotuned voice dappling over preppy pebbles. More instant hooks and tingles keep coming, each song trying and succeeding with new sounds and ideas. Only Holiday could pass for Freshman VW, rikki-tik drums and polyrhythms all where you'd expect them.

I Think UR A Contra could be their first ballad, but it won't be on Celine Dion's next Vegas setlist. A simple, stumbling piano riff plays and guitars oscillate lightly in the background while Koenig gets close to a consistent narrative of love and loss. It's lovely.

This is a great, joyful record. No doubt it's also a record that will end up interpreted a million different ways on blogs, sampled for BBC3 ads, played endlessly at festivals, listened to by people who wouldn't usually etc - but while it’s complete, it’s magic.