Ow [Cassette]

On their new album, Sylvan Esso metabolizes a life of making music with people into making art that you just love, a tactile and enveloping freefall. Written across four years in the woods in Chapel Hill, the longest the band has ever spent writing a record, Ow 8 (pronounced 'Ow Infinity') arrives with an intense immediacy. Most of the tracks here are Meath's first vocal takes, and the clarity and humanness of her singular voice anchors the album in something real. It was born from a time of experimentation and collaboration, resulting in a sinewy, punchy, explosive work where the songs want to claw their way out. A technicolor totem of personal destruction, the feeling of being pummeled to silly putty and built back into something that feels almost human, almost familiar but freakish and new - a cartoonish, slapstick grin printed across a ruin.