Ought - Sun Coming Down (2015)

Ought returns with their second full-length album Sun Coming Down, following a break-out year for the Montréal quartet that saw its 2014 debut More Than Any Other Day make well-deserved waves, with a Best New Music nod from Pitchfork and appearances on countless year-end lists.

Having spent most of 2014 on the road vitalizing audiences with no-nonsense post-punk and the feverishly observational testifying of singer/guitarist Tim Darcy, Ought spent the first few months of 2015 writing, playing the occasional local gig, and eventually heading back to the studio to lay down a batch of fresh tunes.

Sun Coming Down maintains the band's tight, twitchy, economical sound. Ought pursues an artistically apposite austerity in committing these new songs to tape, referencing the arid and unvarnished production of no-wave and early indie rock while balancing carved-out angularity against an evolving comfort with textural coalescences and measured pacing. It makes for an album that's consistently, insistently propulsive but also feels unhurried and pleasantly unhyped.

Sun Coming Down confirms the distinctive vitality and purposive naturalism of Ought, which resists facile primitivism and overhyped dynamics in equal measure, keeping things hermetic but never airless, ascetic but never dispassionate, literate but never prolix.