Sunjacket

Chicago’s <a href="spotify:artist:2CQE8XkRQetXDnoz0nZdRB" data-name="Sunjacket">Sunjacket</a> is not a measure-once, cut-once musical outfit. Bryan Kveton, Carl Hauck, and Garret Bodette toil over four-minute pop songs with workman-like inefficiency, at times wielding scalpels and other times axing away with almost gory abandon. The process: painstakingly thoughtful. The result: an owner’s manual printed in three different languages, only to be set ablaze and rewritten from scratch by its translators.

On More Lifelike, the follow-up to 2016’s <a href="spotify:album:0tH0azZ2A4I9EitwGtjZPG" data-name="Mantra">Mantra</a>, Sunjacket’s synth-driven art rock vibrates with an internal tension, managing to feel both grand and intimate, exacting and ethereal, optimistic and brooding. Lush arrangements threaten to crack at their static-filled edges. Skittering rhythms leap and convulse below silken electronic washes. Voices hover at the breaking point between full and falsetto, imbued with a blend of introspection and world-weariness. It’s the soundtrack to that elusive moment just before limbo finally gives way to movement.