Loves Is Yes paints us into the story of someone drowning in mundanity, slowly losing their ability to daydream as more and more flickering images of the everyday invade their sacred imagination.

As a group of noise musicians turned their attention to traditional folk music, the new album Lacrimae or Eleven Tears by Aune Mire emerged, combining a meticulous understanding of atmosphere with some of the oldest melodies that history can remember.

As a working musician with 50 years of experience, the septuagenarian El’Zabar does not just channel the cultural current of African and African-American music, but performs with a reverent awareness of his own legacy within the scene, joyfully participating in the creation of another historic work.

However, just by taking the time and energy to make such a thoughtful, personal album, Astrel K has honed his musical identity which should go on to serve him well on his identity construction project, suggesting for any of us who face similar issues in our lives to turn to artistic expression as an answer.

Swedish sound collagists Arv & Miljö bring to light the very recent past of radical, tactical environmentalism on their album Jorden Först, a retrospective on the Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front movements using archival snippets, field recordings, and folk music backed by Mort Garson-esque electronica.

By holding our attention with these masterfully executed vocals, the strange, swirling instrumentation gels together into a whole that makes intuitive emotional sense, drawing us into these repeated lyrical mantras.

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.