Somewhere far, far above the hustle and drone of washed out city streets, you stand alone on a high cliff in northern Iceland, overlooking the Norwegian Sea. The sun is setting. Your hair whips around your face and you pull it away, slowly, and stare out at the brilliant blue, slow-moving eternity. You have a bottle in your hand, and you take a sip from it. It’s bitter at first, but the liquid swirls inside your body and all throughout your extremities and pushes you into total comfort. You drop the bottle, run, jump, and for a second, you’re flying. You hit the water with your eyes closed. It envelops and cradles you, and you realize you aren’t separate things anymore. You open your eyes, and the rays of the sun beat down through the ocean’s surface and dance on your face. You might die or you might live, but those things really aren’t important. That’s kinda what Nepenthe sounds like. It’s a gorgeous, emotional record built on the strength of Barwick’s excessive vocal layering, glacial strings, and even a choir of Icelandic teenage girls. Produced and engineered by Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers, and inspired by an ancient drug of forgetfulness in the wake of the death of a family member, Nepenthe is a goliath of understated beauty. (Dead Oceans Records, juliannabarwick.com) Matt Williams