Liars: No. 1 Against the Rush

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with listening to Liars, the good kind where your nervous system feels like it’s been wrung out and left in the sun. No. 1 Against the Rush is them at their most abrasive and least interested in being likable—Angus Andrew’s voice cracking over those fractured guitars, everything slightly out of sync on purpose. I found myself going back to it around the time I was trying to figure out what noise actually meant to me, not as a concept but as something I wanted to hear. There’s something cleanly refusal about this record, like they’re not explaining themselves or smoothing edges for anyone. You either get it or you don’t, and honestly they seem to not care which.