Young Rapids' Pretty Ugly blooms like a brain scan. The thrilling chase of bright synapses across love and loss, melody and rhythm, foils the unsettling uncertainty of the image’s dark spots, those bleak and esoteric moments of life. The deliberate pacing of the record’s emotional reveal sustains the mystery of Young Rapid’s artistic consciousness, never telling the whole story, but instead providing resources for a listener’s educated guesses. In short: it’s pretty heady stuff.

After a short hiatus, the new Young Rapids reemerged in 2014 with purpose. As with their earliest recordings, Pretty Ugly-era Young Rapids carefully and artfully synthesize their interests in storytelling and experimentalism into a vast yet direct sound that’s at times reminiscent of Radiohead, TV on the Radio and The Walkmen, while remaining original. Pretty Ugly is fully formed, each twist and turn reinforcing the album’s character, all leading to the catharsis of closer “Ugly”. “Now I understand,” croons Dan Gleason at the record’s end. And somehow, we do too.