In one of 2014’s quietest revelations, Gainesville quartet Hundred Waters transcended one of pop music’s most shopworn clichés. An upstart group emerged from nowhere in 2012 with a polished, wholly unique debut record, is subsequently chased by every noteworthy major-indie, chooses instead to take Skrillex’s money…and succeeds on all counts. The Moon Rang Like a Bell expands on the promise of their debut album without sacrificing anything about what made it good. They upgrade their IDM faerie-queene origins to the oddball electro/R&B mainstage of FKA twigs, Purity Ring, and How to Dress Well, in other words, but on "Murmurs", singer/songwriter Nicole Miglis still manages to sneak in the word "thee."

The group sets "Murmurs" in the kind of ice palace pioneered by the Cocteau Twins or Homogenic, but Miglis pitches her voice to a pained upper register that Björk or Elisabeth Fraser never went. It’s a breakup song themed around a missed birthday—images of candles and wishes abound—but the production’s combination of churchly solemnity and far-off, slow-motion industrial clamor suggest something much more universal: the consistent drone of modern life co-existing with timeless cycles of loss and rebirth. Above all, though, is the song's devotion to "thee," that constant, all-too-human desire to view experience through someone else’s eyes. —Eric Harvey