After teasing fans for weeks with cryptic VHS tapes, Boards of Canada return with an hour of textured, psychedelic IDM and ambient. Thirteen years after their last album, Tomorrow’s Harvest, the Scottish brother duo composed Inferno from blunted loops that travel in and out of vintage vocal recordings, eventually feeding into warmer, melodic pathways. You might feel like you’re swimming through a discombobulating dream—only to wake up and find that you’re safe and sound. In Pitchfork’s review, Philip Sherburne calls it their most welcoming and gratifying album since Geogaddi, using themes of faith and existentialism to tease “the revelation of great secrets against a backdrop of some of the most spellbinding music of their career.”
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Kurt Vile: Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me (Verve)
Lately, Kurt Vile has found inspiration in familiar places. “I’m more emotional,” he told Sam Sodomsky in a recent profile. “I like when music takes me back.” The singer-songwriter’s forthright and wistful new record, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, is an exercise in revisitation that yields expanding, not diminishing, returns. Recorded and self-produced largely in Philadelphia, the LP imbues his musing, psychedelic roots rock with grounded reflections on family, friendship, and the City of Brotherly Love he still calls home. Opener “Zoom 97” might as well be a thesis statement—as he put it, “It’s about life. It’s about my orbit.”
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Paul McCartney: The Boys of Dungeon Lane (MPL/Capitol)
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