That left School of Seven Bells with only one remaining member, Alejandra Deheza. She and Curtis had gone from being friends to being romantic partners to being only friends again, all while writing and touring together for over half a decade. Understandably, the album was shelved.

In October last year, Deheza surprised us all with the announcement that the final record she and Curtis worked on would be released this year. For fans, it’s been a long time coming. And for newcomers, this record is a sort of morbid curiosity.

SVIIB is, for all intents and purposes, a self-titled album named for the band’s popular short form. It’s clear from listening to it that Deheza has been working on the album since Curtis passed away, as it frequently sounds like a memorial to her friend.

But the album never descends into melancholy or despair. Moments of it feel as if they were written for Curtis after the fact, like Deheza’s refrain in lead single Open Your Eyes: “You are my pain love, you are my sorrows; Can’t you see we’re the same? You’ve got me crying, and now my heart is breaking. Cause I’ve been weeping and I’ve been waiting here silently for too long.”

Other songs are much more transparent: “Confusion weighs so heavy, and I understand nothing of these changes,” Deheza nearly whispers in a stand-out track where it feels like she’s barely holding it together. (It was the last track she and Curtis wrote together.) On A Thousand Times More, she promises to be there until the pain is gone. Elias walks down memory lane with her friend, and thanks him for the time they shared. On Music Takes Me, she gets even less subtle: “I just want to say thank you, thank you for all you gave,” she sings, laying her pain out against the anthemic synth pop background tracks.

Ultimately, that’s what makes SVIIB so compelling. While Deheza is dealing with unimaginable loss, the album never loses itself in the grief and constantly reminds the listener — and in its own way, Alejandra herself — that life is something you cherish while you share it.

On the album’s closer, This Is Our Time, School of Seven Bells stretches their wings for what’s likely the last time and sings about being free to dream. From anybody else, on any other record, it would sound like an inauthentic attempt at positivity. But on SVIIB, it’s given incredible depth. The album transcends synth pop, becoming an intimate and beautiful album dealing with grief and loss in a real, open, and healthy way.

SVIIB is the sort of album that tops year-end lists, exactly the kind you don’t want to miss. It has all the earmarks of a record that will be treasured for years to come.

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You really only need to listen to Turn To Dust to understand what I mean: the soft kick drum and the acoustic guitars, paired with singer Ellie Rowsell’s angelic voice, carry all the menace and creepiness of grunge’s best work, but marries it with a sense of experimentation and texture-driven tension.

Wolf Alice holds off on their grunge tracks and influences for most of the record. I suspect they would consider themselves more of an indie band than the saviour to grunge they’ve been portrayed as, despite their influences and heritage, but songs like Moaning Lisa Smile, Fluffy, and You’re a Germ betray their ancestry (and are reminiscent of Nirvana at their absolute best).

But the band really shines when they’re willing to experiment with new sounds: Lisbon is one of the highlights from the record, which snarling and screechy guitars during the chorus and angst-driven lyrics during the verse — but instrumentation that feels more in line with some of indie rock’s best dream pop. Silk is similar, and feels almost similar to tracks from The National.

The experimentation isn’t always successful, but that it’s so interesting is indicative of a general failure of mainstream rock to bring us an artist who’s willing to be bitingly sincere and inescapably sure of themselves. While Wolf Alice’s style is difficult to nail down, it’s hard to argue that works against them — their stylistic variety is held down almost exclusively by Ellie’s vocal work.

If Ellie Rowsell’s vocal work defines My Love Is Cool’s eclectic whole, then it’s hard to define it as anything other than a grunge record: her lyrics are positively Cobain-esque, as she holds up a mirror to her anxiety and personal issues and cogently tells the listener how it is without dwelling on anything more significant than the messiness of it all.

Wolf Alice’s debut isn’t perfect, but it’s a great example of a band struggling to form its own identity. As they move from one style to the next, sometimes trying things out that don’t work, it seems clear that their willingness to try something new will keep Wolf Alice interesting long after their contemporaries and peers have disappeared.

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II is a distinctly lo-fi record, performed almost in entirety by frontman Ruban Nielson (with the exception of the drums and a few horns). For this reason, the album sounds very tight musically — Ruban is clearly an expert musician — but it also sounds distinctly lo-fi, almost as if its being played underwater.

That’s the intention, of course, on a record that seems obsessed with vintage-style songwriting and musicality, but it might also be for thematic reasons. On one of the record’s most poignant moments, Nielson sings “I wish that I could swim and sleep like a shark does; I’d fall to the bottom and I’d hide till the end of time in that sweet cool darkness.” That Simon & Garfunkel-style melancholy is perfectly suited to the production style of the record.

The production is worth talking about: It demonstrates that Neilson has, compared to his peers, a superior understanding of what made those old records great. Today’s recordings reveal every note with crystal clarity, but these older records age so well because their production inefficiencies hide some of their details and preserve a sense of mystery (Led Zeppelin IV being a classic example).

While Unknown Mortal Orchestra is often reminiscent of the afore-mentioned Led Zeppelin and Simon & Garfunkel, they’ll also remind you of The Beatles’ approach to psychedelic pop (From The Sun) or Jimi Hendrix’s trademark fuzz sensibilities (One At A Time). This amalgamation of style makes Unknown Mortal Orchestra feel uniquely original, in an odd way: So Good At Being In Trouble is at once comfortably recognizable and uniquely Unknown Mortal Orchestra, with Nielson’s falsetto during the chorus giving the song a sense of urgency.

The same sense of urgency is often missing throughout the latter half of the record, which feels frustratingly more indulgent (although certainly in line with the styles the band is emulating). When the band finds their groove again on Faded in the Morning, it’s a much-needed and appreciated kick in the pants. But the wandering in the album’s mid-section demonstrates the band’s mastery of this lo-fi psychedelic style: unhurried and willing to experiment, the band refuses to settle on a single style. It’s an approach almost entirely ditched on last year’s Multi-Love, perhaps because the band felt they took the sound to its natural conclusion on II.

Regardless of why the band drifted away from this approach to songwriting, II feels like the sort of record that will later be recorded as a forgotten gem. Authentic and unique, despite its blatant influences and obvious stylistic emulations, II might go down in history as Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s best record.

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That style is embodied by Rock Bottom, a song that reveals the college mentality is alive and well with Brendan Lukens’ writing. His writing reminds you that he’s aware of the people around you, but he seems aware mostly of himself.

Despite Lukens’ nearly Seinfeld-like inability to care about anybody around him lest he forget to deal with his own personal issues, the album has an air of intelligence to it. Skipping class because you already know it all, making literary allusions because you can and not because you want to, but caring more about chasing girls and identifying patterns of failure in your past, Modern Baseball is the perfect trip down memory lane for those of us who have already wrapped up our post-secondary education, and it might be the easiest record for students to identify with ever.

On one of the album’s loudest anthems, Lukens explains in an aside that he’s “sharp as a tack, but in the sense that I’m not smart, just a prick,” and it’s in that moment that you realize (if you hadn’t realized already) Modern Baseball is the real punk deal. Despite their college-age sentimentality, the band is more likely to tell you off if you displease you and write off your favourite 1920s-era American novel as a total waste of time — despite being well aware of the context of your friendship and your favourite novel.

Like Weezer, the band excels at writing catchy jingles to throw their self-deprecating lyrics at. And while the post-punk pop-punk style itself isn’t particularly unique, Modern Baseball’s attitude injects it with a sense of youthful vitality that has me excited for their next record.

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As a result, the album took much longer to complete than expected. Reported, Smith wrote over 100 songs for Is the Is Are in an attempt to reach some sort of perfection that would allow his audience to forgive him for his crimes.

This isn’t a simple feat: beyond the fact that that writing 100 songs is challenging, writing music like DIIV’s without the help of some sort of hallucinogenic wouldn’t be a walk in the park either. The reverb-laden and chorus-dripping guitar lines are to DIIV what the Edge’s unnamed guitar effects are to U2, but DIIV takes it a step closer to the edge of modern songwriting and experiments with the very form of alt-rock.

In essence, comparing DIIV with Pink Floyd would be wrong, because they sound nothing alike, but they share musical ambitions. While DIIV often writes tracks that feel destined for alt-rock radio, they have a very different approach to shoe-gazing than their peers. The vocals take a step back and become textural, like the rest of the record, making DIIV feel like an electronic band made entirely with “acoustic” instruments.

Songs like Dopamine reinforce DIIV as leaders in guitar sounds, but they also perfectly encapsulate what the record is about: recovering from a debilitating drug addiction and finding your identity in a new reality.

Tracks like Valentine and Yr Not Far are still very DIIV, in the sense that they’re largely built up with effect-driven guitars and bass lines that feel like they’re constantly moving forward.

It’s hard to say if this is a result of sobriety, but there’s a hint of darkness to this record that wasn’t part of DIIV’s sound before. It’s a sense of discontent that comes with success, but also with failure in spite of it. The record feels like a punishment for Smith’s behaviour as much as it does like a checklist of fans’ desires.

Is the Is Are is the sort of record that you know you’ll like within the first listen. It’s not for everybody. But DIIV knows that. With their sophomore album, instead of widening their palette, it feels like they’re doubling down on their sound in an effort to trademark it.

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