Brooklyn’s Woods returns to Big Sur for an indoor show at Fernwood.

Woods’ 2016 City Sun Eater in the River of Light opens with “Sun City Creeps,” a retro journey into elements of deep funk, immersed in calypso-derived rhythms with a West Indian soul. There are horns, falsetto harmonies, some North African jazz influence and a whole lot of controlled Acid Test chaos woven into a fabric of sporadic psychedelia.

The nine tunes on City Sun Eater that ensue are similarly engaging, with consistently fresh grooves. It’s the outfit’s ninth LP since forming in Brooklyn circa 2005 and their greatest work yet. City Sun Eater marks only the second time Woods has recorded in a “legit” professional studio using pro equipment. Woods’ multi-instrumental sound engineer Jarvis Taveniere explains that the band simply began as a home recording band who wanted to make “cool records without any aspirations, just to please ourselves.”

“We weren’t playing by anyone’s rules – waiting three months to tour after releasing a first single, doing press or anything,” he says. “We were releasing albums every few months just because we all lived together.”

Woods’ Jeremy Earl launched the indie label Woodsist in 2006, which has grown into a cult favorite as it releases albums by everyone from Kurt Vile to Real Estate to Mac Demarco. It also continues to hold annual summer festivals, one of which is set in Big Sur.

Woods’ evolution sometimes astonishes Taveniere, especially since no one in the band has any musical training.

“If you go back five years and listen to a record, it sounds like cavemen playing instruments,” he says. But after making seven records that are essentially home recordings, he adds, “we learned how to be a good, functional touring band.

“The more we learned about gear and started going into the studio with other bands, we started to figure out how everything worked,” he says. “When work began on City Sun Eater, everything suddenly became very easy.”

While Taveniere may disagree, a majority of their musical catalog is quite good and not as archaic as he suggests. He believes Woods will continue to churn out records as long as the learning continues and the music keeps improving. “If we thought we were repeating ourselves or doing it just for the sake of doing it, we wouldn’t do it anymore,” he says.

Woods will be joined on the bill by dreamy lo-fi folk outfit The Range of Light Wilderness, a group with Big Sur roots which is one of the area’s best live acts.

WOODS AND THE RANGE OF LIGHT WILDERNESS 10pm Friday, Jan. 20. Fernwood Resort, Highway 1, Big Sur. $25. 667-2422, www.folkyeah.com.