The Silent Years

Like moonlight on a starless night, The Silent Years project across a crisp, endless expanse both starkly beautiful and with a rich, engaging brightness. The Detroit quintet indulge plenty of textured atmospheres but aren’t as shambolic as their dream-pop antecedents. Keyboards paint in broad shimmering strokes, and frontman Josh Epstein’s tenor dances agilely over the spectral arrangements, but the light, drifting psych-warmth is often punctuated with crashes of guitar like meteors incinerating in our ionosphere. The mix of delicacy and muscle is alluring, suggesting Spacemen 3 on the right meds. They calibrate the balance on last year’s The Globe, choosing a broad thematic universe and its resilience, colored in wide-canvas galactic tones that settle over the ringing melodies like twilight traversing into night. Graceful without being toothless, they’re one of the best acts to emerge of late.