There Is No Year vinyl

If you want drama, you got it. Algiers return with their third album, taking inspiration from Blake Butler's 2011 novel of the same name, a scribe they consider to be a friend, channeling the unsettling metaphorical horrors the book disturbs readers with, and carving an unsettling, dread-filled and neo-Gothic score from those body parts. At its most delicate, perhaps "Losing Is Ours", it's a tense, brooding, dark gospel journey into some imagined place conjured from the recesses of the mind you don't always feel comfortable exploring. In other moments we're talking frenetic contemporary punk ("Void"), guns - or at least guitars - blazing. Recorded in just two weeks, it's the band's most concise and coherent work to date, and also their most self-analytical and introverted. Themes can still be read as huge, but the global struggles of the past are now being read through more personal traumas.