For all our literary devotion to sunlit afternoons and dark nights of the soul, real life rarely works in such easy contrasts. Our gold medal moments are flecked with sadness, swollen in purples and blues under the skin, and we scold ourselves for allowing the compromise: this should be the job, the house, the lover, the moment. “How can a child of the sun seem so cold?” Laura Veirs asks on her tenth album The Lookout, and though the line appears only once in allusion to the Colorado native’s childhood memories, it is the question that permeates the entire record.
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‘All I wanted comes in colours,’ Victoria Legrand once sang, and while it’s tempting to mark that as a collection of euphonically pleasing words rather than a mission statement, there’s an element of both. Perhaps I’ve read too much into Beach House’s artwork over the years, but all those records seem to hold together as cohesive shades from start to finish: the woozy amber of the first two releases; 
You don’t need me to tell you this, but I’ll say it anyway: Father John Misty is kind of a dick. He fancies himself a loveable provocateur on Pure Comedy, singing about having sex with Taylor Swift on live TV and then recoiling in horror at the suggestion that it might have been, you know, a little provocative. He was supposedly tripping on acid during that performance, as he was for his 
“Cait #2” arrives less than halfway through Heba, the debut album from Danish quintet Lowly. At two minutes and thirty seconds, it operates as an interlude of sorts, a pleasant but functional aside traditionally assigned the role of breaking up a record’s less timorous moments. Now, despite also being one of the most affecting pieces of music you’ll hear all year, the track nonetheless performs as such a set piece here, and provides – for something quite so breathless – a breather. Why? Because Heba is dizzyingly opulent, an embarrassment of riches delivered with the grace and economy of those who know they have plenty in reserve.
Matthew Neale 