I’m still trying to figure out whether the opening moments of Barrow are spooky or serene. Some water laps up against the shore, and a single piano note rings, then repeats. We’re watching the tides come and go. It’s calm, definitely, but the kind that’s suspiciously too calm. I find myself listening, timid, waiting to be upended. When the instrumentation builds out, stepping around in splashed dissonance, it’s not a major upheaval. “Procession” fades to “Nightjar,” and Kyle Reigle’s voice casts itself out into the water. And then the drums—a big ripple. So yes, the opening moments of Barrow are serene. And yes, the opening moments of Barrow are also kind of scary. It ebbs and flows.

The most beautiful details on Barrow, Reigle’s second record as Cemeteries, emerge from its percussion. Small melodies constantly leak through and accumulate—plucked, short, and restrained against the expanse of Reigle’s voice. On “Can You Hear Them Sing?” the notes decay so quickly that they’re almost beyond perception. “Empty Camps” anchors itself around a climbing arpeggio. On these tracks, Reigle sings beyond himself. His voice goes out as he breathes in to speak, and comes back having doubled over itself. Reverb, like the tide, is ceaseless, always returning.

There is very little between sharpness and wash on Barrow. Sounds either come in as quickly as they disappear or enter slowly, without origin. It becomes easy to feel the spectrum break apart into its constituents—a vertical stack from bass to drums to guitar to voice to atmospherics, a horizon line folding into itself as the record moves forward. “Sodus,” the second-to-last track, has a particular propulsion, and even though the chord shifts are hidden in circulatory guitar swells, it picks up a melody that pushes it forward, lurching and uneven. It’s imbalanced, faster in its first half than in its second, and incessant, a melody that doesn’t want to disappear.

Barrow ends by washing itself out. One final note on “Our False Fire on Shore” warbles, sputters, and fades. Then the tide comes up to wash it away.

Barrow is out now via Track and Field Records & Snowbeast Records.