In the end, Frances decides that a stoic acceptance of personal and interpersonal emptiness will minimize our pain, leaving the album on a somber note as she continues to navigate this trying moment in her life.

Passage from room to room within this space fails to provide any relief, only increasing the feelings of alienation and anxiety as sirens wail and a layer of noise leaks in from the outside.

However, as much as this album focuses on the unstoppable discomfort that comes along with the passage of time, Lihla offers us one comfort to keep our hearts from freezing to the core: love.

These themes of luxurious melancholy are explored on the new album Last Liasse by helen island, a collection of dark ambient synthpop imbued with both breathtaking opulence and somber gloom.

The few moments of uninterrupted peace on this album draw us in with their angelic tone and rich atmosphere, but just as we settle in the entire track bubbles over with the nervous energy of glitchy digital noise.

Composed of a supercut of the catchiest and heaviest riffs to emerge from lengthy improvised guitar and bass recordings, this record perfectly synthesizes digital pattern-based sequencing with the sort of groove and grit that can only come from analog instrumentation.

Where the guitars sit still and meditate on a single tone, our thoughts shut down one by one, drawing all our attention to our hyperactive, terrified core, chasing itself through streams of consciousness and angular riffs.

A few moments here and there point back to the party-ready atmosphere of some of goth’s more popular records, but the darkness that And Also the Trees explores here comes more from their environment and their culture than from the sort of self-destruction that we often expect from the genre.

On this maximalist, theatrical epic, even the most well-intentioned human characters appear to us covered in a thick layer of filth, pointing fingers at one another as the world falls victim to human behavior.

Though a songbird adorns the cover of Spectral Evolution by Rafael Toral, the birdsong we hear on the album actually emanates from Toral’s homemade synthesizers, twittering and fluttering wildly against a slow, warm backdrop of jazz chords.

As we meditate in front of the mirror, our reflection shifts in and out of focus, stirring within us a deep discomfort that we can’t ignore, even after we look away. This discomfort, a cumulation of our guilt, our trauma, our anxiety, and our regret, fuels the new folksy soft rock record A Million Easy Payments by Little Kid, an album with easily listenable, melancholic sounds and a lyric sheet that will shatter your heart.

Warm, twinkly riffs step aside periodically to reveal glorious cascades of distorted guitar, the type of brick wall compression sound that has picked up steam again off the back of the Deftones revival.

Methodically collecting all of this grief and dramatically ejecting it in a cathartic gamma ray, these thirty minutes of pure musical intensity provide an emergency exit for all of our negativity.

The new album I Am Kurdish by Mohammad Syfkhan was born out of one refugee’s harrowing experience of violence at the hands of ISIS, as one of his sons was killed in the ongoing Syrian civil war. However, you wouldn’t pick up on this traumatizing background just by listening to the album; in fact, everything we hear here feels celebratory, even jubilant in tone.

This record hums with creative energy, unloading its pent-up desire in dramatic jazz solo outbursts that adorn an otherwise deliberate and methodical post-rock journey.

The new record Ambivert by Blemishes takes a maximalist approach to ambient sound design, assembling an explosive mosaic of oversaturated, uncomfortable sounds interspersed with a handful of concise noise rock songs.

Itasca wanders the west in search of her love, or more accurately that feeling of warm spiritual belonging that drives our relationships deeper, turning us from selfish individuals to lifelong lovers.

Yet by speaking to these frustrations, by explaining her process of pulling samples from dreams, and even by cutting up and scrambling stories that are too intimate to be decoded, Pennyslop succeeds in making something serious, personal, and profound. 

Totally dissatisfied with the chaos and incredulous bullshit the world has seen since their last release in 2018, Planet B returns with Fiction Prediction, a scifi-skewed cyber rage project that sees no relief in sight.

The album plays out like a ballet, introducing each moment and character with a distinct musical motif, navigating a winding path through free jazz riffing, rigid motorik rocking, and sublime classical gliding.