On its third full-length Remembering The Rockets, Strange Ranger continues to excel at translating the way intimacy can feel so overwhelmingly gigantic. With a dozen releases across its 10 years as a band, the Philly-via-Portland-via-Montana group has traversed genres, moods and textures while maintaining one important throughline: an exploration of closeness.

2016s double-LP Rot Forever was a 72-minute freakout that paired Built To Spill grandiosity with early Modest Mouse intensity. On the 2017 follow-up Daymoon (Tiny Engines), Strange Ranger hung up the distortion pedals and traded caustic yelps for Alex G-esque croons. Frontman Isaac Eigers writing style reads like a loose assembly of quotes from conversations hes had with others spliced with his own, private introspections. He is a modern master of conveying the anxiety and uncertainty of growing older through a mixture of childhood nostalgia and interpersonal tidbits.

For a topic as severe as ecological collapse affecting his own parental aspirationsas well as other melancholy ruminations on loneliness, the passing of time, and the complications of emotional intimacy Strange Ranger still ended up making the lushest, smoothest, and most pleasingly hypnotic album of its career.