Paradessence, Visible Cloak’s third full length, is an album of tension and reassurance. Its thirteen songs shift, heave, and shimmer against a faintly luminous backdrop of night, a cavern-like space shaped by sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world. The arrangements are simultaneously grandiose and fragile. As adventurous as anything they’ve produced so far, Paradessence is both an inversion and culmination of what came before.

Since becoming Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have explored oppositional concepts like organic and artificial, randomness and deliberation, authenticity and reproduction, through a complex set of cultural influences. Paradessence continues this kind of balancing act but brings these strains into greater urgency as life in the 21st century is reordered by these same tensions.