Music always carries memory – of other songs, of rhythms and melodies and how they were imprinted on us. “You sang at dusk/With your fingers moving/And I heard the same song in a dream,” Phil Elverum sings on “Huge Fire,” at the start of his epic new album. Night Palace“I sing it now to myself/I carry it into the night/I walk and there’s a fire, but it’s at my back.” The indie-rock artist in life behind the strange mountain Moniker delivers these lines over smacking, clipped cymbal crashes, like an ’80s new wave hit spun in reverse on vinyl, until a wave of static washes them away.

Night Palace East a thorny, beautifully introspective record lasting over 80 minutes, and it’s full of memories like this, brought back to the present with the immediacy of a performance over Zoom or Oda — the livestreaming project Elverum helped lead during the early years of the pandemic. The album’s clouds of noise recall My Bloody Valentine in its Sisyphean battle against the abyss. And it echoes the distressed indie rock that Low began creating in 2018 with Double negative and the new solo album from co-frontman Alan Sparhawk, born after the death of his wife and bandmate, Mimi Parker.

Elverum experienced a similar loss in 2015 when his wife Geneveive – who had just given birth to their child and was still in her 30s – died of pancreatic cancer. And Night Palace constructs a similar language of healing from noise-damaged songs, a lexicon of musical memory and also of forgetting, because time degrades memory in a way that is reflected in these fractured and fragmented recordings.

There are moments of tender clarity and wonder Night Palacelike the single “I Saw Another Bird”, fostering a new subgenre of songs (see the rise of Mercury Rev “A bird without an address”) about the winged creatures we rediscovered when the CoVid lockdowns gave us time to notice them. There are the joyous bursts of “Writing Poems,” which wouldn’t be out of place on The glow Pt. 1 2Elverum’s 2001 album under the name The Microphones, a touchstone that inspired an entire generation of artists (including the late Lil Peepwho sampled it) and that this album resembles his sprawling Pacific Northwest animism.

But fear and terror coexist here with flickering moments of happiness. The 51-second “Swallowed Alive” is an explosion of screams and din, with Elverum’s daughter Agathe speaking the only words (“You are swallowed by the lion/Swallowed alive/and live to tell the tale” ). The horror is both societal and personal, as “Non-metaphorical Decolonization” makes clear with a minimum of metaphor: “Now we live in the rubble of a colonizing force/whose racist poison still flows… Let’s leave this old world breaking and transforming/ Allegiance to nothing but the burning moment of the present.

The record often feels like a dialogue with a child, or a time capsule to be opened when they’re older, alternately gut-wrenching and comforting, mimicking the mercurial and inchoate nature of memory. It glimpses horrors, present and future, accounts for privilege and guilt, recognizes the stupid and laborious procession of daily life and how imagination allows us to use fear, shame and sadness in positive ways, to construct collective exorcisms. By the end, on “Demolition,” Elverum has stripped things down to simple guitar arpeggios and recitation, a narrative of a downward spiral that should be familiar to anyone dealing with reality these days, and a tale of retirement meditation which brings some relief.

In the end, hope shines. The album is often difficult to listen to and, despite the occasional guitar or earworm solo (see “I Walk”), it doesn’t work very well with divided attention. But treat yourself to it as an experience, it will likely bring you comfort, inspire empathy, and perhaps even inspire you to action.