7/10

Taylor Swindells has always been a master of restraint, but 'In Our Wake' feels like the moment he transcends it, delivering a full-bodied inhale of memory, wonder, and atmospheric craft that places Neighborhood Libraries among the most quietly influential voices in modern ambient music. This is the sound of an artist who has spent years honing his palette until every shade, shimmer, and tremor lands with emotional precision.

Where earlier releases flirted with the cinematic, 'In Our Wake' lives inside it. The record feels like wandering through a gallery of moving images, each track a fragment of a larger emotional landscape. Swindells composes like someone sketching onto fogged glass: the shapes are soft, blurred, and deeply evocative, revealing themselves slowly before dissolving again into stillness.

From the opening moments of 'I Choose the Astronaut', the album radiates both intimacy and expanse. Tones bloom gently, as if illuminated from below, while melodic contours rise like distant signals in the night. There’s a palpable sense of longing wrapped inside the piece, conjuring the push and pull of dreaming big while clinging to the small, meaningful details that define who we are.

The textures across the album possess a rare organic warmth. Keys are softened at the edges, flourishes drift like dust caught in a projector beam, and synth lines pulse with a calm that feels lived-in rather than fabricated. Tracks like 'Phosphorescence' glow with a submerged luminescence, while 'A Shaky Camera at the Edge of the World' plays like a memory half-recovered. Each piece is a vignette, but together they form a constellation.

What makes the record exceptional is its emotional clarity. The artist works without lyrics, yet communicates with a narrative depth many songwriters never reach. He composes as someone profoundly aware of time; how it moves, what it leaves behind, and how it shapes us. Moments of awe are balanced by moments of ache, but always with a tenderness that anchors everything in human experience.

'In Our Wake' is not only the most refined Neighborhood Libraries release yet; it’s a landmark for anyone who believes instrumental music can tell stories as vividly as words. Taylor Swindells captures the quiet truth of being alive, that we are always leaving something behind, always carrying something forward, and always learning to see beauty in the spaces between.