Truth or Consequences, Yumi Zouma’s third album and first for Polyvinyl was produced by the band and mixed by engineer Jake Aron (Solange, Grizzly Bear, Snail Mail) Christie Simpson’s voice gives weight to whispers of impressionistic poetry, shielding hard truths with soft tones, while Burgess’ vocals reveal a rarified dimension of raw and lucid romanticism, with lead single “Right Track / Wrong Man,” in particular, exhibiting a Balearic tempo and bass-heavy energy that belies its underlying tension. The first Yumi Zouma album to feature live drums, Truth or Consequences radiates a brazen spirit of perseverance. “I love the duality in a lot of disco songs, where they’re incredibly upbeat, but there’s real frustration in the lyrics – sort of like, ‘Nothing’s going the way I want, but I’ve got to deal with it any way I can,’” Simpson says.

The sophomore full-length from Post Animal, Forward Motion Godyssey unfolds with a frenetic momentum, mercurial and unhinged and gloriously volatile. In a bold leap forward both artistically and sonically, the Chicago-based alt-prog band sets their existential questioning to a wildly kinetic sound, mining inspiration from genres as divergent as electronic and psych-rock and at one particularly sublime point achieving both stoner-metal brutishness and dreamy R&B elegance in the very same instant. At turns rhapsodic and unsettling, meditative and chaotic, the result is anything but subtle: a body of work that beckons deep involvement from the listener, a richly layered experience primed to leave its audience indelibly transported.

Kevin and Christina make out in a car at the airport, flipping off the police officer that tells them to keep moving. Kevin and Christina discuss taking ecstasy as couple’s therapy. Kevin and Christina break down and then reconnect. The new love we heard about on the last of Montreal record, White is Relic/Irrealis Mood, is settling. If that was the falling-in-love record, then this is the staying-in-love record. That was the easy part; this is the interesting part, the challenging part, the next chapter of Barnes’ autobiographical album streak, UR FUN.