The weather is bad, and I’ve been exhausted. There’s been this cold and gloom that’s overtaken me and completely warped my sense of time. I’ve been trapped in the gray trenches with nothing but raindrop massacre vol. 2 by cleo walks through glass. The record’s blown-out guitars and booming drums recall witch house, though there’s something different happening here. The music doesn’t feel like a revival as much as a blend between shoegaze and emo, with little breaks of club drums that jolt you back to life. 

The ending of “my favorite hangnail” bleeds into “return to dust,” which features ivy knight. It’s a track with incredibly mixed vocals, guitars, synths, and drums; it feels like an indie song from the late aughts dragged through subway tunnels before being glossed up again. You then traverse through eerie ground on “everything I’ve tried to do,” whose basically indiscernible vocals ring with a haunting echo. After that, the pounding bass of the upbeat-yet-gaunt Winnie Wanders collaboration “warm;blooded” beats the energy back into you.

In the months since this release, cleo walks through glass has dropped a number of other projects that work in a similar tonal space but display an expansive range within those parameters. There’s work that veers more towards the compositional side (SUICIDEGENE TRILOGY) and a gorgeous two-track collaboration with heartc0regirl that riffs on the concept of acoustic singer-songwriter demos. The thing that haunts me the most about raindrop massacre vol. 2 is that I keep searching for raindrop massacre vol. 1, but all I can find are fragments and broken links—another graveyard of dead things. I turn back to vol. 2 for company.