“Seedless Star”

Indiana gets unbearably cold in the wintertime, and the sensation of the color and temperature draining from your surroundings infiltrates Cloakroom’s “Seedless Star”—off their upcoming sophomore LP Time Well—in every way possible. The northern Indiana outfit lean into their guitars and drums so that they land like metal beams against a concrete floor, full of force and hollow echoes. Their brawny instrumentation, though, doesn’t mean this is a testosterone-fueled song. The shoegaze riffs and vocalist Doyle Martin’s frigid lyrics are almost calming. His tone is anodyne, and the stark, simple images that pervade “Time Well” (“You’re tending to the blast furnace/I would never relieve the pressure even if I could”) hint at a comfortable despair, like a body acclimating to freezing temperatures. “Seedless Star” makes a physical sensation usually preserved for winter feel timely year-round.