If You Liked Bon Iver, Listen to These Next

Synthesizers bleeding into guitar, vocals buried just far enough in the mix to feel like something you're trying to remember. Granduciel writes songs that feel like they're always just about to arrive somewhere and never quite do, which sounds like a complaint but isn't. Bigger than Bon Iver, louder, more propulsive. The emotional scale is identical. If you've only heard Lost in the Dream, this one is better.

She spent a decade making intimate, devastating folk records. Then she moved to Los Angeles, started therapy, went back to school, and made something completely different. Synth-heavy, propulsive, more emotionally raw than anything she'd done before. The production is strange, Van Etten's voice is more in control than ever, and the most personal thing is buried in the most unexpected arrangement. Start with "Comeback Kid" and give it three plays before you decide.

His mother died. She'd been largely absent for most of his life, struggling with addiction and mental illness, and he made fifty minutes of acoustic guitar and voice and grief so specific it feels intrusive to listen to. No orchestrations, no concept, no flourishes. Just Stevens asking questions about a person he barely knew and loved anyway. The quietest thing on this list. If For Emma is the record you return to most, this is where it points.

Before they became the band that soundtracked middle-aged melancholy for a generation, they made this. Scrappier, angrier, more urgent. Matt Berninger's baritone is the same but the band around him is louder and less polished, and the songs have a restlessness that Boxer refined away. "Mr. November" closes the album with Berninger screaming "I won't f*** us over" over a guitar that sounds like it's falling apart. If you came to The National through the later records, go back. It's where they figured out what they were.

Recorded in San Francisco in 2004. Californian folk, warm and unhurried, rooted in melody rather than cleverness. Andy Cabic sounds like someone who had nothing to prove and everything to say, which is the rarest combination in any genre. Almost nobody knows this record exists. Worth fixing that.

Recorded in a Florida bedroom on a four-track cassette recorder in 2002. The lo-fi quality isn't a choice, it's just what happened when Sam Beam sat down with a good voice and a guitar and didn't overthink it. Whispered, biblical, strangely comforting. Beam was a film professor, and the economy of his writing is not accidental. For Emma owes this record something. If Bon Iver is the album you put on when the night gets quiet, this is what you put on after that.

Nylon-string guitar, mostly finger-picked, coming from somewhere very still and very far away. González is Swedish-Argentine and makes music that sounds like neither. Eleven songs including a cover of The Knife's "Heartbeats" so different from the original that people argued for years about whether it was the same song. He doesn't fill space. That restraint is why the album feels bigger than its running time.

One studio album. Drowned in the Mississippi at 30. *Grace* has his version of "Hallelujah" (not Cohen's, not the one from Shrek, the one you're actually thinking of when you hear that song) and nine other tracks that move between Led Zeppelin-weight rock and something so quiet it barely exists. Buckley's voice could do things most singers spend entire careers trying to reach. You think you know this album because you know that song. You don't.