On Half Free, Remy’s first release on the 4AD label, she sings about suicide, father/daughter relationships, broken homes, failing marriages, and disparaging family members (in no particular order). The album’s title becomes particularly ironic, quickly, as Remy jokes on the phone in a spoken interlude about how she’s glad she wasn’t “one of those sons that turns into a fascist dictator” but instead just “another woman with no self-esteem.”

While the album doesn’t necessarily come off as political, its comments about womanhood and family are particularly timely — and extremely liberal. As Remy struggles with finding her place, she speaks for women everywhere on the way.

That’s not to say that the record is entirely depressing: musically, it has a consistent, jangly bounce to it. Damn That Valley and Sed Knife are great examples of the sort of thing I suspect U.S. Girls will become famous for: beautiful alt-pop with venomous undertones.

What Half Free really reminds me of is Gone Girl, the 2014 David Fincher movie, or even Best Picture winner American Beauty. Thematically, both similarly examine the home life dream that has come to symbolize so much of the hope people find in North America’s suburbs. And both find the dream to be left wanting, revealing that beneath that facade, the dream is becoming a nightmare of broken homes and disrupted families.

The difference between them is that with U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy is revealing the brokenness from a place of intimacy. While Gone Girl and Beauty can be shocking, Half Free feels like a personal statement. In many ways, the album is more powerful as a result.

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While their first album (States) was folk in a stricter sense, twelvefour feels like something slightly different — largely thanks to the addition of electric guitars and synths, but also because of an extremely glossy production.

But despite all that production, the album really breathes. That could be owed to the time of day it was written and recorded: in between the hours of midnight and four a.m., an experience that singer Sam Bentley said he would never repeat.

The point was to try and capture creativity at its (supposedly) most primal time. Largely, the experience pays off. These are all songs that you’d play in the car after a long day, driving home after midnight when nothing feels right, but nothing feels wrong either. I think you can hear the somber exhaustion throughout.

Much like those magical hours, the album has an air of mystery to it. That’s why it breathes. I also suspect it’s why it still sounds distinctly like The Paper Kites. It’s an authentic and raw album, despite its shiny production values.

The Paper Kites have succeeded in a way that few bands can: they’ve made a record that’s larger in scope and sound than what came before — with bigger and bolder production values — but it doesn’t sound like they’ve sold out. In itself, that’s an amazing triumph, but it’s their willingness to experiment that has me excited about their future.

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That’s not a complaint: the record excels because Savages aren’t screaming at you from a distance. They’re intimate, asking questions — the same questions that punk has asked since the beginning — but doing it in a way that makes it feel like the band is two feet away.

I read one review of the album shortly after its release that said the album feels like a songwriting rut for the band. I find that perspective very interesting: I understand what the author means, but as somebody who’s played in a number of groups, this sounds exactly like what a band would put out if they were comfortable.

These songs weren’t meant for a stage, necessarily. They were made for the basement. When friends are over and they want to hear what you’re working on, but you don’t have the space to get right in their face about it, you’d play something like this. It’s still got a bite, but its instrumentation is quieter.

While most punk (and perhaps even most post-punk) sounds like an angry, barking dog, Adore Life sounds like a long and bitter stiff drink. It’s a step forward for the band musically and sonically, and it’s also a tremendous sophomore effort that surprises fans and breaks the mould of what we often expect from the genre.

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At their heart, The O’My’s are a soul band, but they’ve infused it with hip hop, jazz, blues, classic rock, and more. Chicago Style, as a record, is more diverse than most artist’s careers. You can tell just from the band lineup, which includes a trumpeter and a sax player, and their guest list — which includes Chance the Rapper — that The O’My’s aren’t interested in pigeon-holing themselves.

At their best, The O’My’s sounds like a dirtier Alabama Shakes. Compare The Wonder Years (the first track) to Girl It’s Been Fun (the second track). There’s a wider variety of influences than Alabama Shakes’ music, but they share a similar soul. There’s a falsetto in The O’My’s music that doesn’t sound too dissimilar to Brittany Howard’s vocal range, and both bands share a fascination with 70s-era psychedelic rock.

At the same time, The O’My’s are very much in their own realm: their music really does sound like Chicago, making the album title very apt. Its a laid-back fusion of the modern hip hop that Chicago has become known for and the old-school R&B that it was known for back in the day.

There’s a revival happening right now in Chicago with its music scene, and I’d love to see The O’My’s becoming the leaders of that movement. When you hear their music, you’ll just know: they get it.

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Dark Red is an intense trip into the mind of somebody who’s experienced loss. In one interview, he talks about how his music has started to intertwine with grief coming as a result from dealing with “the cycle of life”.

The resulting album is one that stares into some sort of dark abyss and comes out the other end alive, but not necessarily well. It’s an electronic album where the synths are all pushed to their distorted maximum, where music isn’t necessarily made to sound pleasing but exists to experiment with textures and atonal notes.

That’s not to say that the entire record is a long experience of disconcerting anti-melody; actually, there are many melodies placed throughout. But it’s more like a long trip through somebody else’s process of struggling with pain and loss. The album quickly establishes a mood, and then experiments with it for a long running time.

If you’re familiar with Shlomo, this is the sound of a man known for his production trying to escape the trappings of a “signature sound”. If you’re unfamiliar with him, Dark Red is at the very edges of experimental electronic music. It’s too early in Shlomo’s career to say whether or not this is when his music leaves the edges of experimental music and dives off the metaphorical cliff, though.

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