Goat 
The legacy of Swedish psych outfit Goat seems all but certain at this point, as they head into their fifth album, Medicine. The band’s built a reputation on blast furnace guitar and polyrhythmic patter paired with a flamethrower flick of vocals. It’s a formula that’s served them well, though, as they head into a new album there’s an undercurrent of psych-folk making its way to prominence. That’s not to say that Medicine has softened the band’s sound all that much, but with a creeping pastoral quality that’s hovering between Wicker Man auras and an admitted influence from home-country heroes Arbete & Fritid, Charlie & Esdor and Träd, Gräs & Stenar, the album catches a colder wind than their last few.
The album feints a bit, with an opener that returns to the forge and fires of old, but quickly lets in the cooler autumn breezes, wrapping a comforting chill around the listener. The album is marked by a heavier hand on the acoustics and a prevalence of flutes. The band’s balance of bucolic moments and corrosive riffs drives the album, creating a tension between entropy and ecstasy. The barrage of rhythms that often accompany the album are tempered as well, still driven by pulse, but no longer as heavily indebted to the ZamRock school — more Schwingungen than Ngozi Family this time around. Removed from the aforementioned looming legacy, this would stack up quite nicely with the private press psych-folk school, an album with moments both pretty and punishing. It’s a bit of an homage to Sweden’s psychedelic past, and the band carries on that canon as scholars and stewards of a new era.