Deerhunter, Dirty Projectors

For the past decade, Deerhunter have been evading nostalgia and looking to the future, one album at a time. Led by the inimitable Bradford Cox, the Atlanta-based group garnered a cult like following with 2010’s Halcyon Digest, an ethereal, otherworldly endeavor that stretched the confines of rock music and fortified their self-described “ambient-punk” noise. Now, with their latest Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? the band reckons with the demise of society and the spoiled fruits of capitalism. “I go around and I feel how it fades,” coos Cox on the harpsichord-driven album opener “Death in Midsummer.” It’s the group’s most haunted outing to date, conjuring up a grotesquely beautiful sound that both lays waste to the past and offers a light in bleak times. — JVV