Pressure Machine

Pressure Machine began in the early months of the pandemic, when the band saw that the Imploding the Mirage tour would have to be postponed. They briefly considered using leftover songs from that album, then chose a concept record based on Flowers' childhood in Nephi, Utah. Vannucci remembered Flowers saying, "Follow me down this road." Keuning rejoined the band in the studio after completing his solo album, while Stoermer was absent from the recording because of difficulties caused by the pandemic.

Flowers wrote all the lyrics before the music, and every track was written by Flowers and Rado. The band recorded with analog methods. The band took inspiration from Johnny Cash, John Prine and Springsteen's Nebraska, and the spoken interludes from This American Life. Quiet Town draws on a 1994 train crossing accident that killed two seniors from his school, and Phoebe Bridgers sings on Runaway Horses, a song partly inspired by her own 2019 cover of Human. West Hills III is set to the hymn tune Kingsfold.

It reached nine on the Billboard 200, topped the Top Rock Albums and Top Folk Albums charts and was the band's seventh British number one. No singles were released. Metacritic averaged 79 from 22 reviews. Damien McCormick called it "their best album in years" in The Guardian, and Clash wrote that it was "perhaps the closest we've come to the emotional core of the group itself." Pitchfork called Desperate Things pure Nebraska, a murder ballad about a police officer. A deluxe edition on 25 March 2022 added seven reimagined versions of three of the songs.