You Took That Walk for the Two of Us by Andy Boay

After stripping away its signature frilly maximalism, psychedelic baroque pop turns a bitter shade of gray, a smile frozen on its face as terror twitches through its eyes. Andy Boay assembles such an aesthetic environment on You Took that Walk for the Two of Us, taking familiar components and creating something unexpectedly horrifying. In isolation, organs feel uncomfortably religious within this psychedelic context, collapsing new age spirituality back into the traditions it initially rose to dismantle. Similarly, dry, looping guitars and simple, exposed synths invoke the exact opposite of the sunshine suggested by their bubblegum melodies, ripping psych pop apart and dangling its entrails before us to clinically examine. As a result, despite all our cultural context we carry going into this experience from Boay, we feel entirely unequipped to emotionally digest what we hear, finding an expertly crafted anomaly that instead shatters our expectations. Between us and psychedelic heaven lies an enormous gulf of alienation, one where ego death gets stuck in neutral gear and leaves us staring at ourselves in the rearview mirror.