In our oversaturated digital present Grouper's 10th studio album, Ruins, stands out like a close-up whisper in a packed elevator. Recorded in 2011 on a four-track, during an artist residency in the small coastal Portuguese town of Aljezur (population 6,000), these eight songs—four with vocals, two instrumentals, two distended ambient pieces—feature Liz Harris singing along to minimal piano. Her voice is joined by crickets, frogs, rain, a pulsing heartbeat of a drum, and a microwave powering up after she'd lost electricity. It feels like a field recording of someone digging deeper into themselves, someone who keeps playing even after the lights go out.

Harris has said she composed the material before and after jogs, trips to the beach, and long walks through the ruins of estates and a village, and that she was mostly alone when she did these things. The album is best experienced honoring the solitary way it was composed: it's quiet music that resonates loudly. Headphones bring out smaller details, allowing you into Harris' spare, heartsick lyrics ("Sometimes I wish/ That none of this had happened," "I hear you calling and I want to go straight into the valleys of your arms and disappear there"), but you can also stand back a bit and let the sounds fill the room like an ocean breeze.

And these are more than melancholic love songs. Harris has said Ruins is "A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love." She was clearly thinking deeply about someone in particular when she wrote the album, but Ruins is also political music in that it reminds us we can absolutely unplug and live simply if we choose.

These "failed structures" can take on various forms. There are governments and their systems, yes, and there are also the smaller "tears [that] fall down in patterns on the window" and eventually smear into a whole and evaporate. In the end, the saddest, most vulnerable structure is the human body—none has ever survived forever, or lasted for the ages—but Ruins reminds us how much poetry and beauty can be found in the simplest moments before that inevitable silence. —Brandon Stosuy