If you've ever had serious concerns in your life met with trite, regurgitated sayings from those you're meant to respect, You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To by Knocked Loose should hit close to home.

This optimistic record touches on themes of universality and immortality, enjoying the chemistry of its three musicians and encouraging us to find similar egalitarian partnerships in our own lives.

This discomfort structures the aesthetic direction of Spine by Kee Avil, an experimental pop album that balances beautiful, airy vocals with gritty, organic, noisy, and  dissonant instrumentals to show us the two-faced nature of time.

As the independent rock world turns in a darker, heavier, more dissonant direction, Quebec band Possibles introduces themselves on their self-titled debut as a group unafraid of a lighter, leaner sound.

To Welsh rock experimentalists Obey Cobra on their new record Mwg Drwg, humans have no identifiable purpose on earth but to annihilate harmony, to degrade the perfect order of nature into an industrial planet-killing machine.

However, every second spent in this virtual garden of Eden eats away at our precious time, causing a whirlwind of emotion as we emerge from our lair and notice changes in the outside world.

Each short composition in this 5-track release is limited to 1 minute in length, but there is a sense that these unfolding symmetrical formulae continue on into infinity, even after the recording stops.

These feelings mark the absolute horizon of human frustration, as vain as screaming in agony at the limitations of gravity, and we must continue screaming until the clouds of grief clear and we bury those perfect memories forever.

These overbearing vocals beg us for validation, screaming out from a depressive void that yearns for love and refuses to look inward to find it.

The new psychedelic album The Cool Cloud of Okayness by Tara Jane O’Neil brings this narrative to life, telling the story of an artist who lost their home to a fire right as the pandemic caught the world in its vice grip.

These playful tracks inspire janky and disjointed movement, with crunchy chords, wailing feedback, and discordant counterpoints fighting a tight rhythm section for control over our bodies.

Harsh industrial beats amplify sinful chants, followed by deadpan storytelling segments that adorn a room constructed of dissonant guitars and electronics, all pointing to an intense desire to violate any traditions of the religion that comprises the speaker’s childhood scar tissue.

However, unlike other albums in this genre, the record wraps up on a satisfying note, denoting that our speaker has begun the work of addressing subconsious trauma and finding inner peace, supplying hope for all those who resonate with the middle part of this album's more pessimistic messaging.

Honoring Lord Spikeheart’s great-grandmother, a war hero in the Kenyan struggle for independence, each track brings in new sounds and new collaborators to unlock further outlets for communicating the same core of anger and disgust at a deep history of injustice.

Taking this philosophy by the reins, the new record Total Reality by Aussie electropunks Dr. Sure's Unusual Practice doesn’t so much wallow in the quagmire of late-stage capitalism, as it catches the waves and surfs into a current of fun-loving absurdist nihilism. 

Relishing in this chaos, Real Home by Kiran Leonard takes a kite out and plays in the gale of time, dancing wildly and energetically even in its most pensive moments.

Misanthropy drips off the blade of metallic riffs, explosive percussion, and powerful vocals, sending us on this expedition with Couch Slut to survey the damage wrought by the wildest and unholiest of desires.

Rarely do we see a band that can create a cohesive sound out of a freeform structure, landing hits and riffs in unexpected places but subconsciously communicating with each other so clearly that even the most unsteady moments still make musical sense.

Taking a page from the realm of Quantum physics, Field Theory imagines complex interpersonal relationships as a web of subatomic particles in constant shift, each individual action causing a ripple effect that is experienced by the whole.

A new alternative pop record called Aporia by Sissi Rada investigates our struggle to create ourselves, sonically stitching together poems about random, disconnected life experiences to turn them into a narrative.