Horses

If I Break Horses’s third album holds you in its grip like a great film, it’s no coincidence. Faced with making the follow-up to 2014’s plush Chiaroscuro, Horses’s Maria Lindén decided to take the time to make something different, with an emphasis on instrumental, cinematic music. That album is Warnings, an intimate and sublimely expansive return that, as its recording suggests, sets its own pace with the intuitive power of a much-loved movie. And, as its title suggests, its sumptuous sound worlds – dreamy mellotrons, haunting loops, analogue synths – and layered lyrics crackle with immersive dramatic tensions on many levels.

Heading into Band of Horses’ sixth album, frontman Ben Bridwell wanted to do things differently. He’d been hanging out with some younger musicians in his adopted home of Charleston, South Carolina, and liked their style. “They were making really beautiful sounding records in, like, a storage shack, basically,” he tells Apple Music. One in particular, Wolfgang Zimmerman, had sparked Bridwell’s imagination to the point that Bridwell found himself sneaking out to make demos with Zimmerman on the sly, away from the rest of the band. “It wasn’t a plot to overthrow the record,” Bridwell says. “But in the end, it did feel a bit like a mutiny.” The result is music that feels less like a departure from the band’s core sound than a reaffirmation of it: the anthemic choruses, the windswept grit, the mix of joy and melancholy.