If there’s one moment that defines The Money Store, it’s the glitch 55 seconds into 'System Blower': tennis pro Venus Williams screaming as she swings, looped and crusted with so much noise she’s barely recognizable as human. Shields is a magnificent record, where the lights are blazing, but nobody’s feeling very much at home. That hopeless tundra you reach when you’re at the end of your tether, when you’ve argued into oblivion with no recollection of the original misgiving, and the only definite things that remain are the contrasts between elements: sky and earth, sun and wind. The effect is to set the record’s emotional landscape in a desolate, barren space, one where its central characters are either negotiating the physical distance between them and another far away, wondering whether they can cope, or the emotional disconnect with a face staring directly into theirs. The arrangements here are thunderous and billowing, sparse and punishing, rarely polite. I have nothing left to hear,' goes the tumultuous 'Half Gate'.

But on Shields: 'Plod ever onward across some tundra,' Daniel Rossen sings on the rallying, clanky piano swing of 'A Simple Answer'. 'The sky keeps staring at me/ Frozen in my tracks,' Droste chants among the ambient warp of 'Gun-Shy' 'Past the roaring shore. With Shields, Grizzly Bear got outside of themselves and left behind the domestic comforts of Veckatimest- where Droste sang, 'Hope I’m ready, able to make my own good home' on 'Ready, Able', and 'Take all evening, I’ll just be cleaning' on 'Foreground'.

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