Chiaroscuro 2LP

Ocean Alley built their name on the kind of breezy, sun-soaked psych-reggae that soundtracks a Sydney summer, and Chiaroscuro, their second album, is where that sound started carrying some weight. "Confidence" became the record's breakout streaming hit, but it is songs like "Corduroy" and "Frostbite" that show where the band was actually headed, hazier and more atmospheric than the earlier material. The production here runs denser and the lyrics darker than what came before, a shift you can hear track to track rather than read about in a press release.