Rather than chase down that elusive purity, Shearling embraces and elevates their animal nature, pulling sounds and themes from the American West in the worship of a familiar yet treacherous idol.

Our view of the event gets cut short of any actual resolution, or of any verbal response at all aside from an exasperated exclamation, but the musical framing of these few words within a frantic, energetic, percussive, angular environment shows us the community’s real, raw reaction from which any other action will proceed.

Layers of found and produced sound compress into a single stream of consciousness, pulling together mundane youtube videos, traditional folk music, and euphoric free improvisation into a mass that at first feels incomprehensible.

This existential insecurity combined with the faux safety of codependence sparks the wild energy of Fever Songs by Godot, a deeply empathetic and innovative sludge metal album detailing the absolute self-annihilation following the breakdown of an unhealthy relationship.

No matter the strength of our creative talents, the art we create will always fall short of fully realizing our imaginations, but the new album Shapeshitter by I’m Being Good makes a deliberate decision to lean into this mismatch.

Such an experience of achieving the meager dreams of a small town animates Gem of the West by SENTRIES, an instant art rock classic from this increasingly entrenched internet music powerhouse.

Experimental folk collective Milkweed recount one such story on Remscéla, an album rendered timeless through its fascinating combination of modern instrumentation and deliberately cobwebbed production.

Lydia Roberts captures this widespread helpless stagnation on Quitters, a harsh noise record with a fleshy human core.

Despite the rise of the hypnagogic pop genre to capture this condition, the sound and its capabilities only really reached fruition with the new album Går I Kras by Amateur Hour, a generationally powerful read of an inescapable zeitgeist.

Electronica artist Heith documents this process on Escape Lounge, an experimental pop record that sets atmosphere and structure against each other in an existential battle for the mind.

Earthworks by Nathan Davis and Sylvia Milo renders this hidden life as an electroacoustic collage, a lively composition of inorganic sounds featuring the guiding hand of human narration.

From the same astoundingly prolific artist who brought you Sadness, Trhä, and many other aliases, Life and their new album My Heart the Dreaming Memory reinvents old-school skramz from the ground up.

This epiphany roars to life on The Age of Ephemerality by BRUIT ≤, a post rock neoclassical piece that shares our wide-eyed horror at the soulless machine destroying all we hold dear.

As the British prog scene continues down its maximalist, energetic, virtuosic path, London experimental outfit World Sanguine Report forges their own path on Songs from the Harbour, a dark, minimal, subdued emotional tinderbox that constantly teeters on the edge of cathartic explosion.

Italian experimentalists Queimada paint this horrifying view from below on Derive, stoking our well-founded fears of a world with no respect for our future existence.

As algorithms and AI close in, proving their superiority to humans in the process of so-called “content creation,” art like Lullaby’s from an Unlanguaged Underneath. by Wormhook stages the last stand for biological consciousness.

Hope increasingly feels less natural, more contrived, and sometimes downright impossible. Italian experimentalists Mamuthones overcome this hope deficiency on From Word to Flesh by ritualizing our optimism, creating an automatic mechanism for future creation that ensures we always have something to look forward to.

Philadelphia no-wave outfit My Wife’s an Angel enters the studio for the first time with Yeah, I Bet, an angsty open letter dissecting our socially-conditioned sociopathy.

We’re given a front row seat to the creative process on Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu by Neptunian Maximalism, a psychedelic epic that uses the form of Indian classical music to construct something unquestionably postmodern.

A rejection of respectability politics, ask not, want not by cybergrind darling Bottom Surgery holds nothing back in its militant stance against the status quo, laying bare raw emotion in all its ugly and unapologetic glory.