For a few years, Phantogram’s Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter visited Las Vegas almost frequently enough to forward their mail here. They performed at Life Is Beautiful in 2014, at Brooklyn Bowl in 2015, 2016 and 2017, made another Life Is Beautiful appearance in 2019. The law of averages suggests that, following the release of fourth album Ceremony in March 2020, the Upstate New York-based dream pop/trip-hop duo probably would have made a springtime Brooklyn Bowl appearance, at minimum. Then COVID upset Phantogram’s near-perfect Vegas attendance record.

“We’d planned on doing everything that you’re supposed to do when you put out an album,” Carter says during a phone call from Denver. “We did Jimmy Kimmel [Live] in LA, the album came out … and then, like, two days later, the world shut down completely. Crickets, you know—all of our touring got canceled, all of our press got canceled, everything.

“It kind of took a hit on us, psychologically,” he adds. “But we can’t feel too badly for ourselves, considering it affected the entire world.”

Ironically, Ceremony was precisely the sort of Phantogram record the world needed at that moment. It was definitely the album Barthel and Carter needed. Making it was a kind of healing process for the two lifelong friends; Barthel’s sister Rebecca took her own life during the recording of the group’s 2016 album Three. Themes of soldiering on, through brokenness and pain, are threaded throughout Ceremony. “I’m not afraid of the scars; they ain’t ugly,” Barthel sings in “Pedestal.” “I decide when it ends,” she declares at the opening of “Let Me Down.”

But it was “Into Happiness,” released as a single almost a year before the album, that spoke most directly to a scared, frustrated world confined to home. In the context of COVID shutdown, Barthel’s wistful message to her sister—“Fall into happiness/Wish you could be here/No more loneliness/You’d make it perfect”—felt like a sort of invocation, a fervent wish for reunion with friends and family and a return to “a life of gold.”

In a statement accompanying the release of “Into Happiness,” Barthel and Carter called the song an embodiment of “the personal journey” the group has undertaken since its heartbreaking loss, a step toward “coming out of the darkness and into the light.” Carter says the group is glad to share that light.

“A lot of fans have said that [“Into Happiness”] was just the song that they needed at this time their life,” Carter says. “And I got a lot of messages during the pandemic saying that the [entire] album helped them through a lot of hard times. … That makes me very happy.”

Now back on the road for the first time since December 2019, Phantogram has a lot of good vibes to share with a Vegas audience it hasn’t performed for in a minute. Even when the lyrics lean toward the dark and desperate, there’s a thunderous uplift in their music. (The cinematic, utterly spectacular “Fall in Love” is a perfect song to listen to when arriving in Vegas by air, despite—or maybe because of—the bit where things go relatively quiet and Barthel intones, “Babe, the night has swallowed my soul.”)

Plus, in the eight years since Phantogram’s first Vegas appearance, the group has accumulated a legit selection of show-stopping hits, killer tracks that should lay Brooklyn Bowl flat: “Black Out Days,” “Dear God,” “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore” and many others. (And Carter says more are on the way: “We’re recording a new album now, and we’re constantly writing music. I haven’t been this excited about new material in a long time; I think we’re writing some of our best stuff.”)

If you’ve somehow missed every other opportunity to see Phantogram on stage in Las Vegas, you should consider making up for lost time. Phantogram is primed to deliver a golden evening, after been saving up for it for so long.

“[Playing live] is just a lot of hard work and focus and putting your energy into what you love,” Carter says. “You have these sets that just feel so good. … It’s a high you get after being on stage that you can’t replace by doing anything else.”

PHANTOGRAM With Glu. November 2, 7 p.m., $28-$48. Brooklyn Bowl, ticketweb.com.

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