Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins flac album

Painted Ruins is the fifth studio album by American indie rock band Grizzly Bear as the follow-up to their 2012 album Shields. It was released on August 18, 2017 by RCA. Along with the announcement of the album, the band announced a fall European and North American tour. Grizzly Bear spent two years writing and recording for the album

Consider this: Though Painted Ruins is Grizzly Bear’s most synth-heavy and beat-driven album to date (short of the Horn of Plenty remix collection), there’s nothing here that approaches the pluck of Two Weeks, one of the catchiest hits of ’00s indie rock. Mourning Sound certainly aims for a similar strain of driving pop power and comes as close to it as the album gets, with new wave synths and a steady beat. But for once, perhaps what sticks with you most is the lyrical imagery, with Rossen cooing about city street noise. As the guitar comes barreling around a tight bend and the beats hit the gas, it creates this sense that someone’s gaining ground behind you. The scene is apt, as Droste sings about appreciating some distance from a partner while being pulled closer to them.

Painted Ruins finds the members of Grizzly Bear perfectly in sync with each other, especially with the interlocking dueling melodies of the chorus on Neighbors. In a 2014 video interview with The New York Times, Droste called frustration key to the collaborative process. He explained that if they could create an album easily in a couple months, something would be wrong, and at the end of every album, they ask if they will be able to do it again. Three years later, in an interview with Spin, Droste admitted that the recording of Shields was stressful, calling it an arduous, er-and-over thing

Unbeholden to the band’s existence, Painted Ruins has a cavalier quality that you’d struggle to spot in its tense forebears. Rossen and Ed Droste still spindle out riffs that crest like fractal waves, and their haunted Beach Boys melodies echo through the dense orchestrations. But where they used to overlap neat pastoral melodies until the ground felt like it was churning beneath you, the landscape here is smouldering, godforsaken and explosive, their awkwardness untamed. There are a few consistent differences.