With twangy acoustic guitar and lap steel backed by darkwave synthscapes, Sterling Seperpent paints a picture of haunted desert plains, prodigal sons, and ill-fated lovers. Like a shadowy lone ranger, this album gallops off into a blood-red sunset, and we’re glad to be along for the ride.

Though history later subsumed this story as part of a worldwide movement towards market liberalization, artists like Gullibloon shout out from the back of the room, reminding us of the absurdity of a supposedly “socialist” party dismantling a nation’s welfare program.

We don’t know what portal to the underworld has been opened, but this week in underground metal features lots of deep occult themes. Read-on for our top three picks below.

Our result crosses the weightless, immobile chords and harmonies of Slint with the bebop impulse to fly across the track with extended improvised melodies that still manage to act as lead lines.

Like a mountain forming over layers and layers of sediment, each repetition adds an element of some sort, maybe a new harmony or instrument or synth buzzing, the sound of a door creaking. The individual ideas evolve together to create massive and compelling movements over the course of the track before fading away just as effortlessly as they built.

In Nuntis by She the Throne, the insanity of our current trajectory emerges via a series of oppressive industrial saw synths, explosive percussion, intense dynamic shifts, and unsettlingly accessible sung vocals.

A decade since her last release, Marnie Stern returns to perfectly express the feeling of regression for the sake of progress in The Comeback Kid.

A strange, cathartic, and surprisingly relatable testament to the end of something great, A Time to Love, a Time to Die shares in our torrent of tears as we suffer through our reality of failed closure and disappointing conclusions.

Matmos pulls a variety of sounds for us, ranging from the benign, like a typical house doorbell, to the deeply disturbing, like the sound of the human voice after the larynx has been removed.

This week brought us its fair share of underrated bangers and not so underrated bangers in the popular indie / major label scene. Let’s look at a few of these records together!

An eclectic mix of unidentifiable samples and industrial droning are layered together as peopling tames the chaos and sculpts the cacophony into melody.

Unsurprisingly, the week of Halloween was a fantastic one for extreme metal. Here’s some of our favorite albums from this week!

Combining the emotionality of early aughts twee rock with the pissed off grit of modern punk has resulted in an actually engaging indie emo album, a feat I thought was no longer possible in the oversaturated indie rock sphere.

The artist uses blown-out, looping guitar, piano, and drum parts that, while repeating themselves, feel complex, dynamic, and dizzying.

Created during the artist’s move across the globe, Describing the Thing by Shane Aspergen is an atmospheric ambient project that aims to decipher the indescribable with a focus on communication that transcends the sometimes limiting bounds of spoken word.

Matching a bedroom pop, folksy dream pop sound with lyrics absolutely dripping in melancholy and nostalgia, Catbells uses its acoustic guitars and reverb-laden vocals to hit an emotional vein located somewhere between Eliott Smith and Nico.

On the new record CYRM by ØXN, centuries-old Celtic folk music is woven together with contemporary compositions and steeped in an ominous atmosphere to deliver one of the most poignant albums of the year.

Dey struggles to court her avatar, propositioning this perfect being to fuse with her, which would tarnish the digital purity of the hero girl to allow Dey to reach an awkward, halfway self-actualization.

This vocal style, combined with the band’s reliance upon lo-fi synth instruments that almost calls back to the sound of Daniel Johnston, creates a homespun sound with endless charm and personality.

Somewhere in the pitch-black abyss between darkwave and cool jazz, The Lovecraft Sextet explores new frontiers of experimentation on their new release The Horror Cosmic.