Kevin Bronson on October 31st, 2019

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“I got my cape on / like superheroes do,” Alex Hwang declares with playful machismo on “Monsters,” a track from Run River North’s new EP.

If you knew the band in their folky infancy as Monsters Calling Home, it’d be hard to project them as guardians of the dance-floor galaxy. But here they are, footloose and visceral, on the second of their two EPs named as an homage to their original band name, “Monsters Calling Home, Vol. 2.”

The five-song release is the sibling to “Vol. 1,” released in May, and finds the trio — Hwang, Daniel Chae and Sally Kang — spreading their sonic wings as they seek to soundtrack an earnest, communal embrace of life’s simpler joys. “If the songs of ‘Monsters Calling Home: Vol. 1’ were personified as little monsters learning how to dance,” Hwang says, “the songs of ‘Monsters Calling Home: Vol. 2’ are those same monsters now on the dance floor — there’s no hesitation or uncertainty in the movement and feelings. They may not know all the right moves, but I don’t think they really care.”

In introducing the single “Okay Cool” in September, Hwang talked about making songs with a “contagious, genuine sense of joy,” and “Vol. 2’s” little jolts of adrenaline get the job done.

“I’m manic / I’m crazy / I’m living in a dream / I’m honest / I’m joking / I’m all that’s in between,” he chants on the 2 1/2-minute shot of post-punk, “I’m Amazing” (co-written with POP ETC’s Chris Chu), and the aforementioned “Okay Cool” is playful and funky enough to confirm that “amazing” is more a “current status” than a boast.

The EP’s closer “Let Me Down” is the outlier, a piano ballad for post-dance-floor euphoria; it was written with Derek Fuhrmann (Andrew McMahon, KYGO, O.A.R.). “Vol. 2” was produced by engineer Miro Mackie, who worked as the drum tech on the band’s previous full-length, 2016’s “Drinking from a Salt Pond.”

The EP is out Friday.

||| Stream: “Monster’s Calling Home, Vol. 2” in its entirety

||| Also: Stream Vol. 1