The journey to Sylvan Esso’s fifth studio album was a cross-country trip, with a storm on either side. Quite literally—Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn left their longtime home in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene in late 2024; shortly after they settled in Los Angeles, they found themselves surrounded by the January 2025 wildfires. The duo was already mourning the loss of their close friend Jessica, who died of sudden liver failure in 2023. If there is a single throughline on Ow ∞ (pronounced “Ow Infinity”), it’s grief. It’s not an album about death, per se, but about living in the wake of unimaginable loss, overcoming the pain that keeps piling up—“the suffering of suffering,” as Meath calls it on “Flood Season.” “Keeps on being flood season,” goes the song’s chorus, Meath’s delivery rote and matter-of-fact over a glitchy beat that jitters with static electricity. There’s nothing for her to do but keep wading through. Like the infinity sign in the album’s title, Meath and Sanborn’s sparse, patchy pieces of garage rock and indietronica loop like a Möbius strip of inevitable misfortune. “Thank goodness that it keeps on going,” Meath sings on “Ribbon,” then: “When does it fucking end?” Thick sheets of guitar distortion fall over bubbling synths and snares on “Sledge,” whose main refrain consists of the line “destroy, destroy, destroy,” but destruction is by no means an ending. If anything, it’s another turn of the wheel. After “Sledge” we get “Right to Left,” which begins with Meath admitting, “Yes, I was destroyed again.” As cymbal taps rattle beneath her understated vocals, she promises to “keep holding hands / running faster and faster / brighter, brightest at the end,” knowing full well that there may be no end at all—that this is both the biggest blessing and curse of being alive. Counterintuitively immediate and unpolished—no Sylvan Esso record has taken quite as long to come together as Ow ∞—some songs sound like demos, sometimes to their detriment, elsewhere heightening their emotional rawness, recalling classic grief albums like A Crow Looked At Me. Opener “Entertainment & Coca Cola” is a piece of warped and woozy psychedelia; the disjointedness of Meath’s double-tracked, stream-of-consciousness singing captures her feeble attempts to pull herself through each day while stuck in a haze of mourning. Among the bleeps and bloops of the minimalistic “Jessica,” Meath tries to hold onto scattered memories of her friend jumping into the water or prescribing her a meal of champagne and oysters from her own deathbed. The run of “Concrete Glen,” “Back Again,” and “Ribbon” is where Ow ∞’s minimalism becomes a bit monotonous and might have benefitted from dropping one of the record’s more energetic tracks like “Sledge” or “Hot Slob” in there to add some more variety. “Back Again” and “Ribbon” at times feel unfinished, but then again, so does grieving, suffering, and living. Closer “Plastic Sword” feels similarly inconclusive, to its credit. A neat resolution wouldn’t suit Ow ∞, because it wouldn’t feel honest. What does feel honest is Meath skipping along, swinging a weapon of little destruction, trailed by an army of children “gnashing teeth, screaming, yelling.” Sylvan Esso haven’t learned to push down the pain instead of crying out, nor are they supposed to. There will always be more of it ahead; that’s the bargain of being alive. Might as well play through the pain. [Psychic Hotline] Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.