The album makes abundant use of Irish folk instruments and sounds, and the record’s pulsing, meditative structure evokes a leisurely, awestruck walk through the hills.

No album flawlessly reflects the mind of the maker, but people like Dustin Wong at least give a glimpse at what it’s like to get really close.

While grief often receives an unfair appraisal in pop culture as something roughly equivalent to depression, the real life experience of grief manifests as a meandering and painful yet healthy and natural process. For the members of New York darkwave artist Activity, Spirit in the Room serves a key role in this process as the lyricist chews through the initial denial stages of their grief.

Breakup songs can be really cliche, but there’s something about an artist processing the loss of a relationship through their dedicated artform that has me on the edge of my seat. In this case, I’m talking about New Zealand group Strawpeople and their new album Knucklebones, a delicately produced and effortlessly cool plunge into dark electropop.

Winderen sets the scene to contrast the natural and anthropogenic as representatives of good and evil, as the noises of human machinery always throws unpleasant disorder into the harmonious world.

With the occasional hint of darkness sprinkled throughout in the form of suspended chords or near-harmonies, Preludes makes sure that we know that life in this town isn’t a fairytale, but we walk away from the record with an overwhelming sense of Flaer’s appreciation of their hope in spite of its difficulties and flaws.

they’re with you always by mu tate is a potent reminder that we always bear the influence of those we’ve lost

In showing us the fun to be had in a world with access to technology but no particular reason to use it, Nobodyis vaporizes the burden of our anxiety.

Previously unheard components of grandiose wall-of-sound productions take center stage, bathing in the spotlight for their individual solo performances.

If you’d asked me a few days ago for my preferred method for fighting ingrained homophobia, free jazz wouldn’t have been at the top of my list. However, after hearing Vanished Pleasures by The Ghost, I may now be convinced.

Riffs leave you at cliffhangers, with your only source of satisfaction and closure coming in the form of wild wailings about a lack of satisfaction and closure.

You as a listener feel as if you’re falling into this smoky studio, watching in awe as these wonderful musical ideas shoot across the room from person to person. Close inspection reveals all sorts of elements here that ought not to go together very well, from bossa nova rhythms to fuzzy synths to baroque harmonies. However, the resulting album makes these styles feel as if they were born to live together, and Co-Pilot develops their own distinct sonic fingerprint as a result of this mixture.

In this future landscape of pirate radio, anonymous crews broadcast without government permission, making the music selection as unfiltered and random as possible.

Regression & Regret by Life Looks Good brings us some fantastic old-school pop punk from Chicago, and right away when you tear into this thing you’ll feel like you’re moshing in a basement with Fall Out Boy in 2003.

Self-deprecating and vain, On the Run shows us Oldstar’s emotional pain without verging on the dramatic.

This one’s a fairly strong yet relatively typical noise rock record… until you hear the vocals.

Yes, Outside Noise reviews major album releases too! Check out our favorite albums released on July 21st, 2023, including Starcatcher by Greta Van Fleet and more.

G Fam Black and A Dusty Cinema’s collaboration Black Cinema: The Fly Deathbed uses jazzy samples and heavy drums to build this beat that sounds like a modern update to A Tribe Called Quest.

While other metal bands reference Tolkien's fiery pits of Mordor and barbaric gangs of orcs, Hole Dweller resides in the quaint western lands of Middle Earth, among the rolling green hills of the Shire.