Claude says:This was the album where Justin Vernon stopped playing instruments in Volcano Choir and handed himself over entirely to vocals while the Wisconsin crew spent two and a half years cutting up samples and processing weird sounds until they sounded like songs — Bukowski's drunken voice bleeds through "Alaskans," and the whole thing became a critical hit in 2013. A stray play or two in 2024 didn't register, but when you finally clicked in last fall, twelve years after release, you played it hard through winter, especially "Byegone" and "Tiderays."