The weathervane is my body is the sophomore effort from Montreal-based post-hardcore outfit Truck Violence, but in its colossal swings, its precarious peaks and brimming valleys, it reads closely as a creation of careful balance— a project strung between the overlapping mysticisms of sludge metal, noise rock, and the folk music of the Northern Appalachians.

Suffice it to say that Giane Chenheu, the Brooklyn-born producer and founder of experimental collective Surf Gang— otherwise known as evilgiane— is having one hell of a year.

Somewhere Good, the second full-length release from the Bristol-based experimental group the Tara Clerkin Trio, doesn’t defy genre in the traditional turn of the phrase. There’s plenty of descriptors with which it can be tagged— across its 41-minute runtime, distinct trip-hop, neo-psychedelic, ambient, and chamber jazz influences peek their bleary heads around dimly-illuminated corners, only to reappear again and again in the album’s deeply intentional twists and turns. But these motifs and crystallized notions blend together into something that quickly rises above its component parts.

Rumspringa, the sophomore effort from New York/London electronic duo ear, spans 10 tracks and just over 30 minutes. But in that time, it manages to establish a vivid picture— albeit one obscured through its thorough lo-fi aesthetic and universally subdued approach.

In a tangle of brokenness, of missed connections, of relationships lost to the wind and tempered suffering, where and how can you find connection?

Austin-based twee-pop band Touch Girl Apple Blossom recently followed up their 2023 debut— an EP appropriately titled “EP”— with a fully-bloomed project: Graceful, released May 15 via perennial. In its scattered, narrative-based fervor, the project’s 10 tracks scale a lucid tale of heartbreak, battered love, and reconciliation— a markedly ambitious, yet unmistakably modest, turn.

Cola’s foundations were laid in the dying moments of Montreal post-punk outfit Ought, but across their first trio of studio albums, Tim Darcy, Ben Stidworthy, and Evan Cartwright have etched out a vision all their own. With Cost of Living Adjustment, their particular, percolating punk sound has taken on a fuller life— one that extends beyond its ostensible social and political critique to craft a concave image of tangible life, love, and death in the modern, industrialized world.