Dirty Projectors: The Socialites

Dirty Projectors makes music that doesn’t want to be easy. The Socialites is all precision and density—intricate vocal arrangements, time signatures bent out of shape, everything layered until it feels almost fragile. Longstreth thinks about song structure the way an architect thinks about space. It’s rewarding if you’re willing to sit with it, exhausting if you’re not. The kind of album that actually punishes casual listening, which is probably the point.